44 Time April 6–13, 2020am observing whaT may be The f uTure
of work in a San Francisco skyscraper, watch-
ing a transparent, legless man in a T-shirt hover
above a leather couch.
The man is Jacob Loewenstein, head of
business at Spatial, a software company that
enables meetings via h olograms. Though he is in New
York City, a 3-D image of him appears a few feet in
front of me in San Francisco, his face and slightly
tousled h air a good likeness of the photo I later look
up o n L inked In. As I turn my head, which is decked
in a clunky augmented-reality headset, I see that
Loewen stein i s h olding a t ablet, which he hands to
me. When I try to grab it, though, I end up draw-
ing pink lines through the air instead—I’ve acciden-
tally enabled a drawing tool in the app instead of the
one that should allow my pinched fingers to grasp an
object. Other Spatial employees also wearing h ead-
sets i n t he San Francisco office are looking at a 3 -D
model of the surface of Mars. “When people tele-
port into a 3-D space, they can really feel that they’re
in the same room as someone, and they’re sharing
the s pace,” J inha L ee, Spatial’s co-founder a nd c hief
product officer, tells me.
Of c ours e, i t’s obvious that the image of Loewen-
stein i s a n avatar; though he floats at my height, h is
body e vaporates where his hips should be, and I c an
see through his torso to a plant against the wall in the
San Francisco office. We bump fists when we are in-
troduced, but I feel nothing when the images of our
hands meet, and at one point, when I look away, it
appears from the corner of my eye that Loewenstein
is b eing s wallowed by the model of Mars. When h e
gives a thumbs-up to someone on a video screen, his
arm looks like two drumsticks awkwardly glued to-
gether; when he talks and his teeth appear, they glow
a bright greenish white. “Teeth are... not great,” Spa-
tial c o-founder and CEO Anand Agarawala had said
when he instructed me not to smile as a computer
took a photo to create my 3-D avatar for the meet-
ing, a g rim version of my face that looks as if I’ve got
a mouthful of sour milk.
Spatial is trying to solve a problem t hat is increas-
ingly relevant in the age of anxiety about the corona-
virus as more companies, as well as local and state
governments, tell employees to work from home—it
can b e h ard to connect with people if you’re not i n
the same room. In this way, the company is facing
the same challenges as other technology applications
trying to make remote work actually work.
The number of people working from home has in-
creased dramatically since COVID-19 began sweep-
ing t hrough the U.S. Alphabet, the parent company
of Google, recommended that all of its employees
in North America, Europe, Africa and the Middle
East work from home until at l east April 10. Ama-
zon h as t old a ll e mployees globally who are able to
work from home to do so. Other tech companies,including Twitter, Microsoft and Apple, have asked
employees to work from home, as have dozens of
smaller companies.
Spatial says its technology frees remote workers
from staring at giant heads in tiny rectangles dur-
ing videoconferencing and lets them see things in
a more realistic way. Mattel has used Spatial so that
toy designers can upload 3-D images of toys and have
colleagues provide feedback. The BNP Paribas Real
Estate group has used it to show clients 3 -D models
of land and buildings.There are more companies than ever try-
ing to make remote workers feel more connected,
and t hey’re gaining in popularity as the number o f
COVID-19 cases increases. Zoom, the video meeting
software, saw its share price nearly double over the
past month as usage jumped around the world, while
Slack, which allows team members to chat on central-
ized instant-messaging software, says it added 7,000
paid customers—which includes companies and ed-
ucational institutions—from Feb. 1 to March 18, a
40% jump over the two previous quarters. Microsoft
Teams, which allows workers to video-chat, message
and share documents, says that it now has more than
44 million daily users, up 12 million over a week,
while Google says that while hundreds of millions
of s tudents a re out of school, educators are using its
tools like Google Classroom and Hangouts to con-
duct remote learning. Even Apple’s app store started
recommending software to help isolated people stay
connected, including Houseparty, a group video-chat
app; Flock, a team communication app; a nd Time
Out, which reminds people to take breaks.
But there’s something unique that humans get
from interacting with one another that doesn’t come
across as well through technology. “Screens a re dis-
tancing,” says Thalia Wheatley, a professor of psycho-
logical and brain science at Dartmouth College, who
studies t he s cience o f h ow people connect. “In face-
to-face communication, you are sharing a moment
in time and space with someone,” she says. “That is
incredibly compelling for our ancient brains.”
Indeed, there’s a reason companies like Best Buy,
Yahoo and Aetna all experimented with remote work
in years past before telling e mployees to come back
into the office; remote communication is just not the
same. Arguably, the reason that WeWork was able
to raise so much money was that investors under-
stood that remote workers prefer not to stay at home
by themselves all day. WeWork needed to create a
“better than home” experience, a place where peo-
ple would want to be during work hours, as o pposed
to a t h ome or in a coffee shop, the company said i n- “While working from home or ‘third places’
serves convenience, these experiences lacked that
foundational human need for a sense of community,”
the company said.
CORONAVIRUS
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