AUGMENTED-REALITY WORKSPACES WILL transform the way you do your job, and you won’t look weird doing it. At all.
Next time you get a promotion at work, don’t agitate for the corner office. You won’t need it. Pretty soon, your office will be as big and messy and private as you like, because you’ll be the only one who can see it.
The early days of virtual and augmented reality have focused mostly on gaming, but Pokémon Go and Superhotare just a tiny part of how you’ll ultimately use smart glasses once they’re capable enough—and unobtrusive enough—to fit on our faces and into our lives. Most of the people developing mixed-reality tech think the venue where AR will really thrive is the workplace.
Picture it: You get to the office, grab a keyboard off the shelf (because air typing still sucks), and find an open space. You log in to your glasses, and your entire workspace appears in front of you. To your right is a shelf stocked with all the apps and bookmarks you use every day. You reach over and grab one, place it on the floor, and the full-scale CAD model of the car you were designing pops into place. Pinned to the wall are all your digital notes, arranged in exactly the way you left them last night. To your left hover six virtual screens displaying browser windows, stock tickers, and Twitter. You ask Siri to pull up your email, and your inbox appears. You can see everything, but all anyone else sees is you, wearing glasses that look like standard Warby Parkers, typing on a keyboard and reaching around in the air. (This is considered socially acceptable-ish, somehow.) When you really need to focus, you flip on Occluded Mode to turn off the world around you, diving into a black hole of virtual productivity.