Beam me up Scotty

Redefining boundaries and offering a new world of possibilities

After the Covid pandemic of 2020, companies changed forever. For many, brick-and-mortar offices became a thing of the past. Up until the end of the 2020s, tools were continuously improved to offer an optimised, at-home work experience. Company buildings gradually became obsolete. Most were demolished or re-purposed to benefit CSR projects. Even a giant such as Lauv Ltd was no exception. It began with all the furniture being given away – some initially to employees, and then to charity organisations. Eventually, by 2029, the office building in the centre of Lyon was pulled down to make way for a public garden.

All over the world, it was the same. Although Apple kept Cupertino’s emblematic building intact, others were not so lucky. Those few that remained, were turned into state-of-the-art co-working spaces for workers whose homes were too small for a functional office.

Each company needed to devise its own policy regarding working at home. To help simplify the new working landscape, employees were increasingly asked to keep their office rooms minimalistic. White or pastel coloured walls became the norm. Furniture was kept simple, just a desk with a spot to recharge 360 glasses and headset, an ergonomic seat and a coffee table. Cameras, installed by the employer, were placed in each corner of the room, to allow a realistic, 3D rendering of the employees during virtual meetings.

Work was just the first step. Soon, virtual presence became commonplace. Let’s say you happened to be living in Seoul, and you wanted to go on a quick tour of Paris. A couple of steps into your exploration room, and voila! Thanks to Deepl’s simultaneous translation tool, you’d understand a local guide perfectly. A weekly meeting with siblings on different continents? No problem, you’d just pair your 360 glasses together and meet for a walk in the park you used to go when you were kids. Your exploration room would be able to reproduce the place down to the last detail – even the sweet smell of cut grass – thanks to the fragrance sensor on your 360 glasses.

By 2051, you could pretty much do everything from home. Cook with your family, purchase groceries and walk the aisles of a supermarket, play games with your friends, visit your family and of course, work with your colleagues. Virtual had become the new normal. For Lauv, it was all he needed. Except perhaps, a cuddle from his grandchildren.

Real or virtual? Towards a new understanding of the word “presence”

The phone has enabled us to talk to each other remotely. The smartphone has added our faces to our voices so we can ‘see’ each other from afar. The next step is not only known, but perfectly realistic. In May 2021, Google presented Starline, a mirror-screen that enables face-to-face conversations with depth perception. This is the first step in an evolution that will allow humans to be virtually in the same place. Until now, the technology has been used in television to conduct duplex interviews. Face-to-face will then give way to the notion of physical presence in the same place (real or virtual), thanks to the evolution of connected glasses and headsets, Google Glasses having pioneered this concept.

The 2020 lockdowns introduced us to social distancing for the first time in contemporary history. This phenomenon has led us to explore the demand for remote collaboration tools, where headsets (AR and VR) will play a major role in the coming years. Facebook has accelerated the development of productivity applications for its Oculus for Business headset. Two solutions have been introduced: Spatial and Immersed. The first allows any room to be transformed into an immersive workspace, where each participant appears through their avatar. Immersed is more of a concentration space: it connects people and virtually teleports them to the same space so that they can interact.

These headsets will present us with a whole new range of opportunities. Just take virtual supermarkets, for example. In 2016, Keiichi Matsuda shot a visionary video featuring augmented reality elements in a very real supermarket. Two years later, Amazon unveiled the first draft of a fully virtual supermarket at Prime Day in India. The aisles of the mall can be visited in an enclosed space, where you can literally walk through the stalls of each brand using a simple VR headset.

With a sophisticated headset, virtual travelling doesn’t seem farfetched. Ava Robotics, among others, has developed intelligent telepresence robots to ensure virtual teleportation. This has implications for the professional world – as Owl Pro does for meetings. Similarly, in the fields of culture and tourism, schools and universities, players such as Double Robotics are already present.

While virtual reality currently has room for improvement regarding image definition and realism, thanks to increased computing power and speed, these obstacles will be removed in the decades to come. Soon, we will see speeds being expressed in hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes per second. The first hundreds of gigabyte connections are expected in early 2030. And by 2051, 8G is likely to be installed in most populated areas of the world, allowing tens of terabytes per second to be passed.

The only unknown is how our smart cities of the future will look. The notion of hybrid work introduced after the pandemic should accelerate the reduction of office space, that can then be replaced by green spaces and gardens. Buildings could become virtual. So too could architecture, which means that office real estate will need to be reinvented for a new era. This step is the logical continuation of industrial augmented reality applications imagined by Microsoft with Hololens in 2017.

When we consider how – in the space of just a year – a pandemic could so drastically change our habits, working with a headset is just around the corner. There’s no doubt that the technological improvements of the past few years will continue apace. Our future lies in virtual reality and it’s not insane to think that this will intensify. In addition to the Oculus headsets mentioned previously, Facebook has also recently launched its own virtual workrooms for better collaboration. These workrooms might soon become the future of our current meeting rooms – working with VR headsets. Using spatial audio, they’ll give participants the feeling of being in the same room as others. And there’s more; the virtual room can be configured according to the needs of the meeting – be it for a presentation, collaboration or conversation. New features will soon be developed, allowing users to have their own avatars and mixed-reality desks. If this is the future of work, it’s not difficult to imagine the same outcome for play.

Welcome to the virtual future.