Frame 01-02

a holographic, photorealistic version of yourself. Your
colleagues are in the room with you like genies; they are
ghostly apparitions, pictured from the waist up.

Evolving Infrastructure
Doomsayers speculating on the prospect of a future in
which everyone is walking around wearing headsets
worry that we will become permanently distracted from
the real world. They warn of losing our sense of a shared
environment and basis in reality. Wormhoudt, Petronis,
Beck and Lee, however, are as upbeat as the immersive
worlds they have created. They have no doubts about
a technology-led future. Wormhoudt believes ‘VR and
AR spatial tech has the ability to follow through on the
internet’s promise of letting us all work together’. Petro-
nis waxes lyrical about the huge benefits to sustainabil-
ity by eliminating the daily commute. Beck even believes
in VR collaboration software’s capacity to compensate
for lagging infrastructure such as public transport. If the
technology works the way he wants it to, Lee hopes we
will no longer be permanently head down, eyes glued to
our phones: ‘We’ll be able to stand up and look straight

ahead with our bodies open to the world in front of us.’

The logical end of this is a significant reduc-

tion in demand for brick-and-mortar offices. ‘Instead

all we’ll need is a blank white room,’ Lee imagines. But

is this what we want? And who will be responsible for

installing these minimalist white cells? At the moment,

eXp Realty equips all employees with memberships

to co-working spaces much like many employers dish

out gym memberships. But who is to say, if working

remotely becomes par for the course, that the employee,

rather than the employer, will not have to shoulder the

responsibility for finding a physical workspace?

Looked at another way, working without brick-

and-mortar offices could reverse the flow of popula-

tions into big cities. Wormhoudt muses: ‘I grew up in

a small farming town in Iowa. These days it’s mostly

just retirees and people dealing with poverty or drug

addiction or both. There’s not enough industry to

provide jobs so people can afford to live there. It begs

the question what if we could decouple where we

work from where we live?’ With the help of virtual

and augmented reality, it seems we can. ●

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SPATIAL

Instead of an alternative
immersive environment,
Spatial uses augmented
reality to allow teams of
remote and onsite workers
to collaborate on projects
more intuitively.

FRAME LAB 151