We may be closer to holographic meetings than you think

This is great think piece on how the same tech that powers Pokémon Go might make virtual meetings more like real life in the near future. It originally appeared on recode.

Now six months into the pandemic, it’s not unusual to have a work meeting, a doctor’s appointment, and a happy hour without leaving your desk. And our new Zoom-centric lifestyle isn’t going away anytime soon. With cold weather around the corner, you can count on spending more hours in video chats and a lot less time seeing people in real life. A small startup called Spatial thinks this is an opportunity to transform the way we interact in digital spaces.

Spatial’s co-founders are incredibly excited about the future of augmented reality. You may have encountered AR, which is a technology that superimposes digital images onto the real world, during the Pokémon Go craze four years ago. But instead of making it look like Pikachu is in your living room, Spatial makes it look like your coworkers are there — or at least realistic avatars of them are. Spatial also works with virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Quest, which put you in completely immersive digital environments, but the company’s co-founders seem particularly bullish about AR and a future in which we’ll all wear lightweight glasses that blur the line between the real world and a computer interface.

This sort of thing isn’t just some sci-fi fantasy anymore. The pandemic is showing us how, if the technology becomes more accessible, AR and VR experiences can fill some of the vacuum of human connection that remote work has created. Spatial is providing a glimpse at how useful this technology can be: It can make working and learning remotely feel more like being in an office or a classroom, rather than just being a box in a Zoom call grid. But to get there, the tech needs better connectivity — namely 5G, which is rolling out across the United States and other parts of the world, and could vastly expand what we can do with AR, VR, and countless other technologies.

“I think this pandemic has accelerated not only the pace of development but also has opened up brand new or expanded business opportunities for new applications or need for the existing applications to be recognized,” Babak Beheshti, dean of the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences at the New York Institute of Technology, told me. Within five years, he added, he believes that technology like lightweight AR headsets — let’s call them smart glasses — will replace the smartphone for many people.

A world where people interact through headsets is something that’s been anticipated and even feared for decades. While VR technology has fully arrived, it’s mainly been adopted by gamers. Meanwhile, AR technology seems to be stuck in arrested development. This has limited the possibilities of mixed reality, which combines elements of VR and AR and anchors virtual objects to the real world so you can interact with them in new ways. Here’s an example of what a mixed reality might look like through smart glasses: