Tech that makes the office just unreal

One recent morning, Stephanie Rosenburg arrived at work to find her PC monitor had vanished. She looked around the office and saw that members of her team were wearing headsets with seethrough visors and grabbing invisible objects with their hands.

Rosenburg handles marketing for Meta, a San Francisco start-up that makes augmented reality (AR) headsets that overlay holographic images on the real world. Users can manipulate 3D models with their hands or browse web pages and send emails from floating virtual screens.

Her boss, Meta chief executive Meron Gribetz, is determined to end what he calls the “tyranny of the modern office” by replacing monitors, keyboards and eventually even cubicles with augmented reality. To get there, he’s using his own employees — including Rosenburg — as test subjects.

Gribetz believes office workers will one day huddle around holograms to collaborate on tasks. That means no computers, cubicles, regular desks, or chairs.

“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.”

Gribetz believes he has a chance of snatching the lead from betterfinanced rivals by testing his technology on employees who are focused the goal of transforming the workplace through AR.

The experiment is being overseen by a team of neuroscientists who are collecting data from Meta's employees: how people's eyes and bodies feel in the headset, how much work gets done compared with using monitors and the overall experience day-to-day. Meta is also encouraging employees to write daily logs about the experience.

Even though the goal is to make an operating system that Gribetz says will be 10 times easier to use than an iPhone, the technology is still in its infancy. So as expected, the rollout has been a demanding experience.

The benefits of the technology are most clear for companies that make physical products. Carmakers, for example, 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. —