This startup wants to replace your office with 3D holograms

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 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 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, 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 $50 million 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 $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 commoditized, 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.