An office without desks, chairs and PCs
Yes, this startup wants to use 3D holograms instead
A San Francisco startup is determined to end what it calls the ‘tyranny of the modern office’ by replacing monitors and keyboards with augmented reality.
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. Rosenburg had just returned from vacation so it took her a few seconds to process what was happening before she clued in: “Oh,” she thought. “It’s my turn now.”
Rosenburg handles marketing for Meta, a San Francisco startup that makes augmented reality headsets that overlay holographic images on the real world. Users can manipulate 3D models with their hands or browse Web pages, send e-mails and write code from floating virtual screens. 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.
Tall with impeccable posture, 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 in the real world. 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; 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. Many tech companies use this tactic, known as dog-fooding, but employees at larger firms often have multiple projects and incentives.
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.
Not all of the software packages that the engineers used day-to-day were compatible with the headset. They also had trouble testing and writing code at the same time.
Eventually, Gribetz let the engineers revert to monitors and transitioned small groups at a slower pace, starting with marketing, sales and administration. Before long, useful feedback began pouring in Some employees reported a distracting jitter when using the technology. The coders tweaked the algorithms and the problem disappeared. The hand-tracking and stability of the images improved. Employees participated in a company-wide hackathon to create various applications. Among them: a 3D data visualisation tool, a sticky note app and a stress-relieving orb that makes different musical notes when prodded. The company has filed several patent applications that cover concepts and tools developed during the dog-fooding process.
Inevitably the technology made some jobs easier and others harder. Esther Lekeu is designing the next-generation headset. In the past she would bring two-dimensional drawings to design-review meetings. Now, everyone dons a headset and looks at the mockup as a 3D hologram, moving it around and viewing it from all angles. “That’s been night and day in terms of communicating my idea,” Lekeu says. — Bloomberg