Your Next Conference Call Could Be A Hologram
How AR, VR and even holograms will compete for your office’s attention
Videoconferences: they were supposed to be the future.
A sci-fi staple since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis — and seen in everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Back to the Future 2 (“McFly! Read. My. Fax!”) — the videoconference is a shared cultural symbol for a more convenient way to work.
And in many ways, they are amazing technologies. They allow us to work from distributed locations. They also help us maintain a sense of “presence” with distant colleagues, who otherwise would just be faceless co-workers we only recognize by email.
But despite all their benefits, videoconferencing tech has also introduced us to a more nuanced form of awkwardness: we see our colleagues, but we don’t really feel like we’re in the same room.
Which has left anyone who’s ever worked in an office asking: is this it? Are we fated to slog through Google Hangouts for the rest of our days? What’s next?
The answer could very well be augmented reality.
“Augmented reality brings a human element into communication,” says Evan Helda, sales director at Meta, a Y-Combinator alum that’s developing augmented reality headsets.
“Today we talk only by voice or on a flat screen. We don’t feel like we’re there with our colleagues. [But] if there was a hologram version of yourself, say during a sales call, you could make eye contact with a person. You can read their facial expressions and get insight into how the conversation is going.”
One of Meta’s first use cases: wearing the headset, seeing a colleague represented in AR in front of you, and “handing off” a digital object to them. In other words: no more walking across the building to go to a meeting. And maybe no need to send follow-up links after a video call, since you could just “hand over” the relevant files.
Those kind of abilities have benefits far beyond everyday office work, too — and not just in AR.
Companies working in virtual reality are excited about the potential to work directly with files and data as if they were real things.
“Flat screens don’t represent how you engage in the world,” says Gil Baron, the CEO of virtual reality storytelling firm Visionary VR. “With virtual reality, you have six degrees of freedom and can work in physical space just as if we were in the same room. This is important for people like architects, who can share 3-D models just as if it were real life. It kind of collapses time and space.”
Or collapses how we think about collaboration. Seattle-based Pluto VR — founded by the creator of Bejeweled — is even experimenting with integrating virtual reality into the staples of today’s office work diet — whiteboarding, and conference calls.
And then there are holograms.
There have been, of course, several popular forays into holographic tech, like CNN’s Election Night 2008 “hologram” (actually a topogram, which is a kind of three-dimensional CT scan) and Tupac Shakur at the 2012 Coachella festival.
The company behind the former, SportVU, now provides data tracking for NBA games. So unless you work in the NBA, they won’t be coming to your office anytime soon.
But the company behind the latter, Musion, is working with Cisco to bring holograms into the world of video conferencing. The networking giant tried out a proof-of-concept holographic telepresence experience in the mid-2000s and have only improved the technology since then. The challenge is that the holograms take up an enormous amount of bandwidth — about 10,000x the rates for HDTV — something that people like optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian and his team at the University of Arizona are working to overcome.
So whether the future of videoconferencing is AR, VR, or something else entirely, that future is coming, and fast. Twenty years ago, the idea that we could engage in a free (or almost free) video conversation with anyone on the planet instantaneously would have seemed like science fiction.
Twenty years from now — or maybe even in ten — your next conference call could be a hologram.
