Meta plans to bring 3D holograms into offices

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 see-through visors and grabbing invisible objects with their hands.

Her

boss, Meta founder and Chief Executive Officer 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.

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 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. Gribetz’s own office provides a glimpse of how a future workplace might look. He has a thin slab of wood at standing height as a desk. It’s just wide enough for the headset to rest on it. He plans to redesign the rest of Meta’s office in a similar way.

Meta isn’t the only company with big ambitions for augmented reality. Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. are also devoting considerable resources to developing the technology; Apple’s Tim Cook told Bloomberg he was so excited about AR that he wanted to “yell out and scream.” 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.