What will remote work look like in the future?

In terms of working remotely, we haven’t seen anything yet… Forget video conferencing by Zoom or Skype, jI tested “Holoportation” for you, a combination of holograms and teleportation. Imagine a video conference, except that instead of appearing as a thumbnail on your computer, the colleague you’re chatting with will appear in front of you, life-size, 360 degrees.

You can go around it, almost touch it, like holograms in Star Wars. Still better than zooming on the laptop! It’s Microsoft that offers this solution, with browsing the explosion of remote work.

To create this illusion, you have to wear large glasses with depth cameras and a projector, which will broadcast into my field of view a life-size image of my colleagues. And not only: we will be able to work together, but remotely, on documents and virtual objects: imagine we work for a car manufacturer, we can make the car appear in our midst we design the layout, I take the tire, I pass it on to you so you can inspect it … Or a flat outline, we’ll run it in 3D to make changes. And if I have a meeting with a Chinese customer, no problem, the translation will be displayed before my eyes.

With these technologies, we can completely do without a computer

No keyboard or screen needed. Thanks to display screens, which allow one or more computer screens to appear directly in the field of view. The different windows are displayed as if they are floating in the air in front of you, an Excel table, a PowerPoint file, you can move from one to the other, as if you have 4 or 5 screens in front of you.

Much more practical than opening a lot of tabs in your browser. The text is scrolled by following the eye movements of the word. It can also be paired with virtual keyboards, which turns any surface into a keyboard that analyzes finger movements and transcribes them into letters and words. Suitable for work on the go, on the train for example.

when? Is all of this really on point, or is it still an experience that we’ll see happen in our lifetimes in 10 years?

More and more large companies are about how to use this technology: Airbus, L’Oreal, Saint-Gobain, or even APHP (the surgeon can be helped remotely by colleagues who see the process through his eyes). The possibility of “mixed reality” exists, although it is not yet fully developed. The show is still a bit behind. The equipment remains huge: the real revolution is when we can incorporate these technologies into eyeglasses.

And above all, it is still very expensive: 3000 euros per helmet! For companies that sometimes struggle to provide their employees with computers suitable for working remotely, this may seem like a fantasy.

But if we anticipate a future where remote work will become more common – and it will become so, there will be no going back – everything will allow us to re-create a more realistic working environment. Possible while staying at home would be a good take.

And these technologies will become more democratic. In 5 or 10 years this may be the norm. Innovations that will develop further with the deployment of 5G, because another need for this type of technology is to have strong internet connections.

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