Beam Me Up, Scotty

The year 2020 ushered in the #WFH (work from home) frenzy as offices closed during the pandemic. Zoom became the normal mode of communicating, meeting, and collaborating. As employers contemplate the future and vaccinations allow people to slowly head back to work, it is certain that the workplace has changed forever. A hybrid workplace will undoubtedly be the new normal with employers rotating between working remotely and coming into a physical office.

What will this do for collaboration? One thing we learned during the pandemic is that the lack of social interaction and in-person professional contact certainly put a strain on teams. If all team members are not in the same place at the same time, will that strain worsen? 

A colleague who consults with a client in another city shared that during the pandemic, Zoom meetings were a welcome change for her. In the past, she called into team meetings and was a lone voice on a speakerphone in the conference room. She felt more engaged in Zoom meetings when everyone was a square on the screen. Indeed, Zoom is working on a model where people who are present for a meeting in a conference room will have their own video boxes thereby allowing remote workers the same experience. Great start, but Zoom, a 2-D video call platform, does have its limitations.

Enter virtual reality and 3-D holograms. Dalvin Brown reported in The Washington Post on February 9, 2021, that a number of companies are launching 3-D display systems. One beams presenters into meetings and conferences, another enables hologram collaboration within virtual meeting rooms, and yet another enabled holographic-style virtual meetings on their platform. A number of other companies are racing to develop similar Web conferencing capabilities. 

The notion that is driving this innovation is that holograms are more engaging to work with than tiles of faces on a computer screen. Holograms provide the ability to read body language and other physical reactions in cyberspace, and they foster greater collaboration and communication among colleagues who are not or cannot be present in the same place. Not quite in-person professional contact, but certainly closer.

What about the expense of all of this? Traditionally, setting up high-definition holograms required expensive projection hardware and technicians. Software advancements, however, are unlocking ways to use laptops, computers, smartphones and other devices to engage with and stream holograms emitted elsewhere. 3-D display systems are also being developed and start-ups in the 3-D space are positioning their offerings.

It might not be much longer until we can all say, “Beam me up, Scotty,” or beam me into meetings and conferences we might otherwise be prohibited from attending. 

Cornelia Gamlem