The future of work: Gesture-Based Collaborative WorkSpaces
What’s the one thing that’s constant? Change.
That’s right, the one thing that doesn’t change is that everything changes. The irony hasn’t died on us but we have grown to accept it.
Now, this little law applies to everything, including the way you work. Maybe the fact that everyone hates to get up and go to work on a Monday hasn’t changed, but a lot about the way we work has changed. It is also a complete and total coincidence that I’m writing this article just before labour day. Honestly.
I think it’s time to take a brief walk down memory lane. The way we work hard seen tremendous change over the last couple of decades.
Let’s go back to the beginning (not the first time someone ever worked or anything, just a good place to start). So to begin with, the most common workplace anyone had, was construction. Building houses, railways, roads and so on. For a long time, this was the most common source of livelihood. There were also a lot of small to medium businesses run out of homes and communities. With the coming of the industrial revolution, this change. People Now worked in large factories, working together to mass-produce goods. Soon it was time for machinery to take over. Now people’s worked with and in machines.
Then came computers and quite possibly the biggest jump in the way people worked. With the arrival of computers came opportunities to work on software. The rest of time until now went by in a blink and now we work almost entirely on computers and other digital devices. Now you could even work for a multi-million dollar company or of your home.
The one thing that has always remained important through all this, Is collaboration. We what’s had to work together on a common goal to get the best results. Now in the digital age, how do we do that?
That’s right. You read the title. You know the answer. Collaborative workspaces.
A collaborative workspace put simply, is a large room or space where multiple stakeholders in a company come together under one roof to discuss, ideate and execute tasks that require “conversation”. This is particularly important now since we tend to “work-from-home” or work from various parts of a city or even across the globe from each other. This trend has brought to light, the importance and the incomparable benefits of working together.
Now in most places, collaborative workspaces are designed to hold a large capacity of people, has comfortable seating and most importantly, has an indecent amount of whiteboards. Whiteboards work great as a brainstorming tool. People can take in pointers, put their ideas down, shoot down the ideas of colleagues they don’t like, etc. But what we need to realize is that we live in the technology age. Everything can be made better with tech.
So why not digitize these boards? Well, there are companies out there that are already doing this. Whiteboards have been replaced by smartboards. People put down their ideas In the firm of text, handwriting, and virtual sticky notes. You could also access age display multimedia files on these boards if you think that would help the group. These boards also provide the extra advantage of being able to save everything that’s been put on the board. No more illegible pictures of whiteboards with random glares across it.
To kick things up a notch and make things more interesting, certain companies have added gesture control to this activity. Picture this, you’re sitting in a room full of people, everyone has ideas, everyone has something to say and everyone wants to be able to look at the board without people walking across it. So you can now sit right where you are and use gestures to move things around on the boards. If you’re trying to picture that, think of Iron Man & his gesture controlled smartboard. Here’s an image for reference.
Using gestures in place of a mouse or even touch, has several advantages.
Firstly, no one is ever steering right in front of the board, blocking the view for everyone else in the room. Secondly, unlike a mouse, multiple people in the room can work on the board simultaneously. These interactions also Kelli everyone in the room active and interested in the activities that are going on. So you could, in a true sense, collaborate without stepping on the toes of your colleagues. Finally, it looks cool. Yes, it does. And it’s a lot of fun.
You could implement this in any existing workspace or create one that’s meant to do just this. And you would only need two things. A smartboard and a few gesture controllers. The KAI gesture controller works great for this since it is wireless. So you get to move around and orient the group comfortably and at a distance from the board itself. Since it is a light wearable, you will barely even feel it on your hands. And it can be used by pretty much anyone and doesn’t depend on the strength or side of a person. Large companies have benefited from implementing this technology in their collaborative workspaces. They’ve seen an increase in interest, a higher inflow of ideas and overall higher productivity from their employees.
