What if?
“What if”?I find I say those two words most days to myself, my team, and my family. I’m not happy unless I’m thinking five steps ahead; I think this is why my sleep quality is probably always at about 50–70%, which is ridiculous, and I’m not too fond of it.
So I thought I would start to write my what-ifs down and see how they look when I look back a few days/ weeks later.
We are rapidly developing features into our workplace SaaS platform called UMA. I work closely with our development team, and we are constantly looking at ways to make the solution better to achieve our goal of making people’s lives easier. I can’t help think that if I had an infinite amount of money, developers and people, what UMA would look like?. 🤔
Today I’m thinking about what we could do in the next 5 to 10 years while thinking about some of the topics we hear about through our news channels, internal teams, or social platforms. Regularly quoted is Metaverse, web 3.0 and what is becoming another commonly used phrase, “Decentraland”, — describing a social world where users can interact with one another, play games, and build up and manage a digital property on an open platform.
This got me thinking, will the Metaverse be what we all think it will be? Will we all be meeting in virtual spaces? I can’t help feeling this is more and more like The Matrix every single day. Instead of taking the blue or red pill, I’m sitting looking at the type of headset I will wear. Will it be a Magic Leap or Oculus, or will we use our standard glasses with built-in audio for real-life sound? I think all of this will be available to choose from, and by that, I mean mass adoption will follow once the key barriers of wireless and affordability to are resolved.
I spoke to a friend about the Metaverse last week; “within the next decade,” he said, “it’s likey we are all going to be in some form of a virtual ecosystem like the well-known computer game Sims”.
My friend explained his thought process in this area had been formed based on observing his kid's interaction with technology. Children and young adults are now naturally playing and building entire cities using computers, consoles and tablet devices. As this progresses into the world of 3D, Augmented reality, why would office space not go the same way?
This leads me to think about the evolution of our traditional social and business spaces and places, including office design. Are they going to be changing from physical structure to virtual? How will this work? I can say that I hope“What if?” will be used when trying to understand how this will develop over the next few years to make our lives and the lives of others easier and better. We are already seeing investors within the private equity space backing innovators and start-ups to help get new ideas in this area off the ground and into the market. Although, towards the end of December 2021, Elon Musk made a pretty controversial statement that attracted many people’s interest.
“ I’m not suggesting web3 is real — seems more marketing buzzword than reality right now — just wondering what the future will be like in 10, 20 or 30 years. 2051 sounds crazy futuristic — Elon Musk Tweet.
I’m not going to lie. I agree. There is not much genuinely, truly where we are hoping to be in 10 years available right now. I would love to see it if we are, and I’m not saying that there aren’t solutions that can do certain aspects of what we are trying to do in the long run (for example, take a look at what Spacital are developing these guys are pretty much doing 40% of it already…).
“What if UMA was a Virtual office?”
Well, we are! At UMA, we provide a digital space for you to work in; we look at how we can better help office workers find their hybrid way of working. We have been looking at ways UMA can blend the two worlds without giving up on the human interaction that we believe in at the core of our business. Being Human (and all that comes with that) shouldn’t be viewed as being replaced within the Metaverse; I believe in that. My vision and expectation is that we can and will blend these two worlds in the short term? What will this look like in the next decade, I don’t believe anyone really knows. We will only create that vision by asking questions like “What if”.
Today, at UMA, we already provide our customers with a digital floor plan that shows their workplace in 2D and 3D. It’s a great way to see how many people are in the building, who is sitting where — what canteen is the busiest and who has booked what conference room. We can even tell you how warm or cool the temperature in these spaces are and the air quality by measuring CO2 levels.
Do we want to meet on VR in Decentraland in a space made of your design? Do we want to have a chat like a WhatsApp style persistent chat? Do we want to do a traditional video call automatically added to your user preferences based on your settings? But what if we could show you on that map as your digital self (avatar) and communicate with you from anywhere by simply searching for you and clicking on your avatar, allowing you to choose how we converse?
When you place a VR headset on, you can not only hear UMA, but you can also see UMA as an Avatar that you have created in your world to help you manage your day, book space, and check the occupancy of an area, find a co-worker. Say you could choose from these options and make it happen in one click or using your voice from anywhere in the world, either working from home, in the office or even in the coffee shop? Would that be something we could all get our heads around ?? The list could go on…
Let’s Break it Down.
I am working from home; I want to meet with my team, so I go to my Digital floor plan and look for a space that’s right for us all. I check in with UMA, which saves me the task of finding a slot in the day where all my team are accessible for an hour. Like most organisations, we have some people working at different locations, including at home so I simply asked UMA to schedule a Teams call (or Zoom, Webex etc.).. UMA Navigates our organisation, picks the suitable space, invites the team, and everyone is available. This has all been effortless and quick for me to organise.
At the meeting, I can go to the meeting room in VR 3D, 2D, in person, as if I were there and see who is in the meeting room.
Below is a screen image of how Horizon workrooms from Meta are building such concepts.
Using Horizon can see live avatars of my team. We have linked our Snapchat accounts to our organisation, meaning we can choose our preferred look and feel, so reflective of the way we are feeling that day. Having this ability has broader social impacts on mental health benefits. It empowers the user with the ability to be and represent how they want to be without the fear some people get in a regular video call — expressing how they feel on their terms.
Only 3 of the 6 attendees are physically in the room in my meeting, and the other 3 are remote. I’m sitting at home with my Oculus on, and I’m sitting in the virtual lobby of the meeting room. We’ve made our meeting hold area look just like the physical space, so it felt like I was in the room with the team. Jason, our sales rep, is out at meetings, so he has joined through MS Teams from his laptop while sitting in Starbucks. Jess is at home today, so she has joined using her own VR.
Because this is a mixed reality call, not a purely virtual one, we can join from any device in any location, mixing the many ways video can be accessed and using other collaboration tools, like Figma, Whiteboarding, and Jira. In these environments, all the applications and tools necessary for your meeting will be available across this mixed reality meeting.
During the height of the pandemic, video saved so many aspects of the world of work. Video has been around for ages but only started to gain full adoption while we worked from home and allowed an opportunity to see each other still and add some normality to our lockdown challenges.
But even with that, and as good as current video calls are, people are yearning for more. Yes, the likes of Spatial and Horizon workrooms that I have mentioned can enhance the experience; I can’t help but think they’re still not at their full potential.
People want real-life experiences from the digital world they want to create. They want to be transported anywhere in the world at the touch of a button or a single voice command. Looking someone in the eye shows you genuinely listen to what that person is saying. Unfortunately, digital empathy isn’t the same as face to face; even on a video call, you can never really see into the person’s eyes. Being in a virtual space, seeing and hearing people like they are in the room, has to be where we are heading. Graphically we are not there yet; there is still some time to go before seeing natural life-like behaviour. I’m confident it will come in the near future.
Audio is already right where it needs to be — spacial audio is here now, and we all use it. If someone is sitting across from you to your left and speaks, I hear as I would in person, meaning I turn my head to listen and engage.
Human integration and engagement will play a massive part in the adoption and success of our virtual and physical worlds blending.
I look at what Spatial, Meta and others are doing with the virtual meeting spaces, and it all looks exciting inside the meeting. The question is, how do we invite people externally to my business to meet with me in these spaces? Today UMA has a Visit platform that lets you perform these natural tasks, such as scheduling a visit to the site, check-in at the location, accessing emails, etc.
These activities will still need to be a part of creating meetings and events. But, “What if” you could greet your visitors from your digital reception in real-time? What if, using AR (augmented reality), we can walk with them to the meeting space you have booked? This brings a whole new way of looking at how the workplace could be staffed and managed.
We see digital room booking panels on the wall outside each meeting room and digital signage showing intra-company messages through our mobile app. All of this can be augmented through the design of your choice. This means we can lose the need for physical hardware like room booking panels and large format displays. Think about the impact this will have on our environment, not having as much technology on walls, fewer devices to maintain and support and reducing the power output of these no longer needed devices.
Office themes and decor can be changed as frequently as you want. Ask UMA to create office layouts and theme templates, just like we do today on our SaaS platform “UMA Install the Customer Experience theme”. You might even want your organisation to reflect a visiting client’s brand on your signage. My point remains the same; we are some time away from an entirely virtual way of working, but it is worth asking yourself, “What if”. You might surprise yourself in the process.
UMA is proactively looking at ways to make our software future-proofed and ready for these changes; this includes adopting current technology integrations, working with new innovations and building easy to use, feature-rich solutions that benefit people and the organisations that need them.
Many thanks for reading.
