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This breakthrough technology could provide the benefits of an open plan office without the huge disadvantages.
To most of today’s executives, the open plan office represents the office of the future. As usual, they’re wrong. Open plan offices decrease productivity because employees hate them. Such workplaces are noisy, distracting and create a significant health risk.
If open plan offices aren’t the office of the future, what is? Simple. The office of the future is virtual and online, so that anybody on any team can work anywhere they want.
That’s already possible to some extent using email, social media, teleconferencing and videoconferencing. Such technologies, however, don’t allow for the kind of serendipitous meetings and interactions that the open plan office is intended to foster.
Here’s the thing. Open plan offices are indeed good at getting people to work together informally. The problem is that this ability comes a high cost in productivity. According to numerous studies, the lack of privacy, noise pollution and visual pollution more than negates the advantages.
However, what if you could create a virtual environment that allowed for serendipitous contact but where there would be no noise or visual pollution, and where you could create a private space (to get work done) at the touch of a button?
As I pointed out in a previous column, that’s theoretically possible using virtual reality. In a VR environment, workers located anywhere in the world could interact in the same virtual space, without intruding on the privacy or creating distractions for people for whom it’s not a good time to be engaged with whatever is going on.
This “Virtual Office” would have all the advantages of the open plan office (and the advantages of working from home), with none of the associated disadvantages.
However, if you’ve ever played a VR game or attempted to interact in a VR environment, you know that your avatar is likely to be rudimentary as when Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated the Oculus headset last year:
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Obviously, nobody trying to get work done is going to have the time to paint perfectly-placed dots on their face. Fortunately, that problem is being solved through some rather clever use of facial recognition software, paired with real-time animation.
Here’s a video I made earlier today showing how this new technology works (excuse the lousy focus–to make this easy I just used my phone to shoot the screen):
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Source: INC.com