A vision of the virtual office
Recently Stephanie Rosenburg arrived at work to find her PC monitor had vanished. Members of her team were wearing headsets with seethrough visors and grabbing invisible objects with their hands.
Rosenburg had just returned from vacation so it took her a few seconds to realise: “Oh,” she thought. “It’s my turn now.”
Rosenburg handles marketing for Meta, a San Francisco-based startup that makes augmented reality headsets that overlay holographic images on the real world.
Users can manipulate 3-D models with their hands or browse web pages, send emails and write code from floating virtual screens. Her boss, Meta founder and chief executive officer Meron Gribetz, is determined to replace monitors, keyboards and eventually even cubicles with augmented reality.
To get there, he’s using his own employees as test subjects to help Meta figure out what works and what doesn’t.
When Gribetz revealed the plan last year at the TED Conference in Vancouver, he was under no illusions about the challenge. “I was extremely nervous about this,” he recalls. “You’re going against 50 years of computing tools.”
Gribetz, 31, founded Meta in 2012 after studying neuroscience and computer science at Columbia University. He made the first Meta prototype with an oven-heated knife and hot glue gun. Last year, Meta raised US$50 million ($67m) from investors like Lenovo Group and Tencent Holdings. Today, its devices are used by developers and companies — ranging from architects to designers to auto manufacturers. By year-end, Meta expects more than 10,000 people will be using the US$949 headset.
Meta’s goal is to make its augmented reality technology a seamless extension of the real world, enabling people to interact with holograms much the way one interacts with real objects. Instead of clicking, dragging and pushing buttons, the technology lets users control 3-D content with their hands.
Gribetz believes AR hardware will become quickly commoditised, so he’s focused on perfecting the software, taking inspiration from Apple’s intuitive user experience.
In his vision, office workers will huddle around holograms to collaborate on pretty much any kind of task. That means no computers, cubicles, regular desks, or chairs.
In his own office Gribetz has a thin slab of wood at standing height as a desk, just wide enough for the headset to rest on it. He plans to redesign the rest of Meta’s office in a similar way.
Gribetz solemnly describes his vision as “cognitively healthy computing” that helps users close “the latency between imagination and creation.” He believes AR will eventually place a meta-layer (get it?) of information around everything.
Touch a piece of food and immediately see its nutritional content, hold a flower and see its DNA, shake someone’s hand at a conference and see a sort of virtual LinkedIn page appear. Some may find that creepy, but Gribetz believes augmented reality is about bringing people closer to the real world.
“This won’t happen overnight,” he says. “But certainly if you move forward about a decade or even less, people will have strips of glass that will look very much like the glasses I have on, that will be able to do everything that a computer, a tablet, or a phone will be able to do, and a whole lot more.”
Meta isn’t the only company with big ambitions for augmented reality. Microsoft and Apple are also devoting considerable resources to developing the technology.
Gribetz believes he has a chance of snatching the lead from better-financed rivals by testing his technology on employees who are focused the singular goal of transforming the workplace through AR. Many tech companies use this tactic, known as dogfooding, but employees at larger firms often have multiple projects and incentives. The benefits of the technology are clear for companies that make physical products. Carmakers can speed up the gestation of a new model thanks to instant holographic renderings of life-sized prototypes. For the average office worker, the perks are more nuanced. Based on the experiences of Meta employees, the biggest productivity gain is having virtually boundless space for an unlimited number of screens. That means focusing on one task while distractions — email, social media — can literally sit behind you. Many employees were reluctant to give up their monitors but, after ditching them for good, said that doing daily work was a much more immersive and visceral experience.