Is anyone else vaguely disappointed we made it all the way to 2024 and there are still no cool holographic features as part of the meeting experience? From General Zod's sentencing in Superman 2 to the sad, post-snap hybrid-work meeting in Avengers: Endgame, the promise of meeting with your colleagues holographically has hovered tantalizingly as the future of work.
But it wasn't until I started using augmented reality devices and poking around the metaverse that I realized those holographic meetings would raise a lot of questions. It's one thing if you're the war criminal being sentenced by a bunch of giant holographic heads; it's another if you're the giant holographic head and trying to make sure the war criminal doesn't see any incriminating details about where you are so they can't enact a revenge plan.
We're not likely to deal with General Zod in our meetings but there have been privacy concerns raised with the rise of remote work -- all that data we're inadvertently leaking into our workplace -- and with the debut of the Apple Vision Pro, those concerns have just been ramped up.
Apple's new device, an augmented-reality headset that superimposes data on your field of vision so you can see both your surroundings and whatever information you've requested. The catch, as the Washington Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler reports, is this:
Each of these goggles contains the rough equivalent to a head full of iPhones: 2 depth sensors, 6 microphones and 12 cameras. It uses them to continuously track people and rooms in three dimensions — every hand gesture, eyeball flick and couch cushion.
That's a lot of data being gathered -- and that data may belong to people who are unaware they've just come into view of a Vision Pro wearer. The privacy implications of augmented reality are breathtaking. And they really make one appreciate the comparatively private environs of offices both real and virtual.
I cannot believe I'm typing this, but thinking in depth about where we're going with augmented reality and devices like the Apple Vision Pro has me seeing a lot of upsides in Meta's version of a virtual workplace. Because it's a completely distinct digital environment, there's no worry about your coworkers passing judgment on your unkempt office or your pajama bottoms; all they see is your digital, professional representation. And your chance of starring in someone else's digital workplace when you just go to get coffee from your local cafe is greatly reduced.
The metaverse has had a rough few years, with people pushing back against previous arguments for it on the grounds that virtual worlds with their disorienting aesthetics are offputting or ripe for exploitation. But these wholly artificial environments can also be controlled to ensure a great balance of professionalism and privacy -- and that might be an argument for metaverse advocates to begin making to the rest of us.
As for our hologram-free present -- the questions of privacy and professionalism are still be answered in hybrid work environments all over the world. And like so many questions around the future of work, how these will be answered will depend who's doing the answering -- and whether they're adequately identifying and addressing employee concerns.
