Digital desks:
The virtual office arrives.
Soon, your work space might exist all in your head.
That’s because computer enabled devices will be able to project virtual, yet fully functional, representations of present-day physical office tools — a monitor, keyboard, mouse, phone, stapler, calculator, pens, paper and file cabinets — within your field of view.
“You could have 100 screens, you could have a hologram, you could have a whiteboard, you could be talking to someone else,” Michael Abrash, chief scientist for Facebook’s virtual reality subsidiary Oculus, said during a conference last week. “Other people could teleport in, you could teleport in to them, they could look over your shoulder. You could work together.”
Abrash is not alone in his vision. The architectural firm Gensler is already creating software to help it design buildings around the idea that workers — wearing virtual-, augmented- or mixed-reality headsets, glasses or even contact lenses — might only require an empty desk, which also could become digital eventually.
“It allows us to take your workplace everywhere,” said Alan Robles, the firm’s creative media leader. “It will fundamentally change the way we develop workplaces.”
Robles believes this way of working might arrive in as soon as three years, and no later than eight, because of rapid developments in augmented reality coming from companies like Microsoft, Google, Oculus and Meta.
Ryan Pamplin, a vice president of San Mateo’s Meta, is already using his startup’s prototype augmented-reality headset every day to project his own office work space. The headgear somewhat resembles a high-tech visor, with a see-through glass screen hanging down over the eyes. It allows users to see projections of their computer screen or whatever they are working on — with the computer seemingly in front of them, in three dimensions. Sensors and cameras pick up head and hand movements, allowing users to manipulate the digital images.
It’s not just office workers. Pamplin said hospitals and medical researchers are examining whether, for example, 3-D holographic scans of a patient’s brain can help with a diagnosis.
And Meta has demonstrated how car designers can collaborate on a new model, or how two architects can view a 3-D version of a building’s blueprints projected in the air in front of them, as opposed to being confined to a 2-D laptop screen.
Theoretically, the designers could be on opposite sides of the world and be able to collaborate on those digital designs, a scenario that would also alter the boundaries of what we now think of as a workplace, Pamplin said.
“Maybe that means we don’t all have to go to the same place every single day,” he said. “You could project yourself to anywhere in the world.”
The ability to work anywhere could change the layout of physical offices. Instead of tethering workers to an assigned desk in a cubicle, offices might need to be redesigned to allow employees to keep moving to different areas depending on what tasks they are doing, said Devin Vermeulen, creative director of physical product for the shared office company WeWork.
WeWork is already using sensors and security camera footage to create data to finetune how, for example, the placement and height of tables hinders or encourages conversations between co-workers. How that changes in the future with virtual- or augmented-reality technology is anyone’s guess.
But there’s no doubt that office designs will adapt as technology evolves.
“We’re scared of change, but it’s the only constant,” Gensler’s Robles said.