Stephanie Rosenberg works at a secretive Silicon Valley company called Meta in San Mateo, California. Meta is working on a new kind of technology called augmented reality. It essentially turns a pair of goggles into a projector for holograms. A few months ago, Meta decided to do something drastic. The company began ripping out its employees desktop computers, making them
switch to using the company's own headsets. Stephanie was off on a work trip at the time, and she was in for a big surprise when she returned to the office. And I walked in next morning and put my laptop bag down and looked up at my desk and realized something was missing. Like all of us, Stephanie is used to having a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. There was no more computer screen on my past i pad. It was
sitting there. Now. All of Stephanie's daily work, like writing emails, making presentations, and monitoring social media happen inside an augmented reality headset. Then I looked around and other members of my team were, uh, you know, reaching out and moving things around in the air there in the headset. Stephanie had no choice but to get used to the change
since those desktop monitors aren't coming back. That's because Meta believes its headsets are going to radically change how we spend our time at work, spending on a future where your desktop will be as obsolete as a typewriter. Hi, I'm Bradstone and I'm Selena Way, and this week on Decrypted, we'll take a look into what the future of work might look like through one startups experiments with augmented reality.
Augmented reality is still at a very early stage of development, and Meta is up against tech giants like Microsoft and Apple that are investing heavily and developing their own headsets that compete with metas product one forecast as the global a R market could be worth a hundred and sixty five billion dollars by two thousand and twenty four. I'll go behind the scenes to see how the transition has gone at Meta and see for myself what it's like
to work with three D holograms. Stay with us, so, Selena, I remember the first time I came across Meta. It was February two thousand sixteen at the TED conference in Vancouver, and I have to say this has only happened to me a few times. In my career covering technology. I put on the Meta glasses, I saw you a virtual monitor in front of me. I think they had the Bloomberg terminal on the screen, and I was like, Wow, this,
if it works, will change everything. And I remember shortly after that conference, you told me to start digging into
this company. And I went back and listened to that TED conference and I noticed it was then that may Ron Gribbets, the CEO, made this very daring promise, which is why all hundred of us at Meta, including the administrative staff, the executives, the designers and engineers before, we're all going to be throwing away our external monitors and replacing them with a truly and profoundly more natural machine.
And Meta has seriously followed through on that goal. Marone is only thirty one years old and he founded Meta in after studying neuroscience and computer science at Columbia University. He made the first Meta prototype with an oven heated knife and hot glue gun the same year that he founded the startup, and last year, Meta raised fifty million dollars from investors like Lenovo and ten Cent. Today, Meta is targeting its headsets at developers and companies and industries
like design and manufacturing. The current headset costs ninety nine dollars and they're expecting more than ten thousand people to be using it by the end of the year. A R will eventually supplant replace the phone and the tablet and the computer entirely. Here my own standing in his futuristic looking office with tall glass windows in a thin slap of wood as his standing desk. He's wearing his
usual jeans, T shirt and blazer. People will have strips of glass that from the front perspective will look very much like the glasses I have on. That will be able to do everything that a computer, a tablet or a phone will be able to do, and a whole lot more so. Augmented reality is a new frontier for computing. Now, this is not virtual reality. When you put the goggles on, you still see the world around you, but you can also see images that are generated inside the headset overlaid
on top of reality. That's why it's also sometimes called mixed reality. And this experiment going on at met At the company calls it dog footing. In fact, John Signs, who's the company CFO, did the nearly forty years ago at a different company. Back then, he was making people
switch from typewriters to desktops. The idea is that by using its own product, Meta will work through bugs and kinks and improve its product faster than competitors, So you're gonna get ten x more of the feedback then you would have otherwise gotten through from your customers before your customers even get it, which is important because there are much bigger companies like Microsoft and Apple working on their
own augmented reality products. But the much bigger idea was, if we're all going to use the spatial office, the holographic office first, we were going to find those killer apps and build them and refine them way before anyone. And by the way, the concept of the spatial office is something will come back to later because working with the three D holograms means a physical office could look totally different that his office looks like your typical startup.
There's plenty of snacks and every type of drink imaginable, from kombucha on tap to coconut water. There's even a band area set up in the cafeteria from Promptu performances. Still, it was startling to see a room full of people wearing these futuristic looking headsets going about their work as if it's totally ordinary. One very new employee, Liz o Wart,
says she felt the same way. We've all seen Minority Report, and we've seen people interacting with holograms, and it was really such an interesting experience to walk into an office environment and see people in my future colleagues actually in the headset doing the things that they would be doing every day. I wasn't expecting to see so much physical movement. People were grabbing empty space, rotating their hands in the air, and pushing air with their arms. Some people were even
turning all the way around them, placing holographic objects behind them. Yeah. I saw the video that our colleague David Nicholson shot at Meta's offices. It looks totally bizarre. I mean, without any context, you would think that you're watching some kind of performance. Are there something from a sci fi movie? Yeah? And the MET headset itself wraps all the way around your head and at the front has this sort of visor. Right, the optical element as they call it, sits in the
headset and is projected onto the visor. The sides of the headset are embossed in brown leather, and there's a strap over the top of your head to kind of balance out the weight. Their sensors on the headset and a front facing camera, but it's pretty light, not too heavy, about a pound. It's a different world going from the two D rail to the three D world. That was Liz again. I was shot three that I would be
wearing it. I had the chance to try the headset myself with Ryan Pamplin, whose main role at META is to get people more interested in using augmented reality. He's twenty nine. He takes the headset everywhere, even on the airplane. His office is also impeccably clean, a white desk with nothing on it except the headset and a keyboard. But inside the headset, his office looks much different. There's a lot more decoration in my version of my office than
in yours. Brian's holographic office was full of personal photos scattered all around in the air, in front of multiple floating screens and little three D holographic figurines around his desk. There's also things I wouldn't put in my real office that I have in here, Like I I wouldn't have all the pictures of my girlfriend and I like plastered everywhere. And I probably wouldn't have a bust of Steve jobs because I don't know where to buy one of those.
And can you hear anything? Yes, there was actually Katie Perry music playing, but I couldn't tell where it was coming from. But then I swiveled the chair around and saw that Ryan had placed the YouTube music video web page right behind me. Turns out there were also many other strange holographic objects behind me as well. And then over here you have the workspace, which is the shelf you see, so why don't you try and grab the instrument. It's the sort of rainbow ball that shelf I saw
part of metas workspace. It's the equivalent of what you see when you first power on your computer. It's the desktop setting that's typically a bunch of icons and folders you click into to access your work. So you can take your hand to put that and just put it flat in front of you. See a We'll circle around your hand when it's in the right place. Maybe you need to be a little closer m and just close your fist on it, and now you can pull it out. Oh got it? Interesting? It's in colorful or and now
go ahead and play it with your fingers. So this is how I relieve stress and make beautiful music. This is wild. Everyone I spoke to at Metasine, the biggest productivity gain was being able to have an unlimited number of screens that you could scale as large as you wanted to. It's kind of like having your own command center where you arrange things three D sixty degrees around you and pull objects to your attention right when you need them. Interesting, So how easy is it to move
these three D objects around? It definitely took me if you tries to figure out how to move them around, how to learned how to position my hands so that the technology would track my hands and allow me to enlarge and move or rotate the holographic object. But I'm sure the demo you tested fixed many of the kinks that employees must have suffered through in the early days. Right, definitely, and Meta is transition across the workplace has been far
from smooth. I was extremely nervous about this. I was extremely I mean it's it's you're going against fifty years of computing tools in one year, as with any major change at work, meta Is transition to three D headsets has at times been challenging. Meta started giving out the headsets at the end of March, and they started with the engineers. They make up one of the largest teams with the highest pressure deadlines. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to start there, so that rollout went
a little out of hand. This is Cecilia, a body a product manager, like, we didn't get as much used as we wanted. The feedback was a little segmented, like people will find one problem and put it down. Basically, the engineers complained and we're frustrated that they couldn't get their work done on time without their regular PC monitors.
We know there's a heat on productivity at the beginnings, and it's okay, Like, it's completely okay that the first days that you use the workspace and the environment on a r you're going to be less productive than your normal work. It's an investment. It's something you have to do so that you find all the problems, so that you build all the things that you need to have.
The transition caused so many issues eventually that Meta decided to give the engineers back their desktop computers and transition smaller groups at a slower pace. They started with the marketing, sales, and general and administrative departments, so they're the guinea pigs. So what were their experiences like? So I've been regularly checking in with a few of the employees trying to track their experiences. They've raised a pretty interesting set of issues.
Wanted the complain was maneuvering the floating screen so that they were in just the perfect places, or dealing with how natural light affects the viewability of the holograms. Not your normal set of workplace complaints. I don't think at the beginning, it was very simple things that were pretty frustrating. I found, for instance, that Ergo headset didn't match my particular head shape, so I actually just attached the weight onto the back to make it so it was more
comfortable to me. It's just a new way of dealing with issues. I found reading for long period of time to be difficult for me personally. So Selena, how is meta measuring whether or not this workplace switched to augmented reality headsets is actually helping the company. They have a team of neuroscientists that are collecting data points and productivity changes like visual perception, speed of interaction, and physical comfort.
That is also encouraging employees to write daily logs. I give feedback on this whole experience, and clearly there was a lot of feedback. So how fast are they fixing these problems? It really just depends on how complicated it is, but for most things it's actually very fast since there's this constant interaction between the teams. When I first started my role out, there was a little bit of jitter, which means it kind of sort of shakes a little
bit in the spot. But then with the last update that I got about a week in a hospital that was gone, they just kissed updating that algorithms. Esther lee Q is an industrial designer whose job is to create what the next generation of the headset is going to look like. So she's actually one of the employees who found the transition quite helpful. Very early on, I really enjoyed using the headset for reviews with our CEO Moron, and that's just been like nine and day of being
able to communicate my ideas. Having a physical, three dimensional hologram that we can all look at and review. It's just taken away so much confusion from looking at a two drawing. According to Mayro and the CEO, the hardest part of the transition actually had nothing to do with the technology. The technology is probably the easiest thing to get done. We got the photo realism, we got most of the kinks of the ergonomics. Guess what the hardest
part was. It was to get people to want to give up the tools that they love, especially software engineers and and folks that have habituated to be surrounded by these these monitors. Um, they've grown connected to them, and now parting with them was It was a real emotional journey for a lot of people. Once employees got over that initial hurdle, they told me that work became a
whole new kind of immersion they've never experienced before. You definitely forget about it off the first sort of five minutes of having it all That was Karas O'Connell met as director of User Experience, and I found myself for getting I've gotten on and leaning in towards, um, you know something, I'm trying to look out on my desk and accidentally head pupping the desk. So this was an interesting thing to hear about. The challenge is going back
to the normal world. You sort of have to go through a decompression almost to go back to these rectangles. Adjusting to the real world after you've been inside the headset for some time can be very difficult. Suddenly everything seems very small. With that. I pick up my iPhone and I sort of squinting at it after being in the headset for a while, and suddenly the irony is the old things don't make sense anymore, and You're like, Wow, why is this so small? I can't believe we have
such small rectangles around us all the time. Liz, who has only been using the headset for a few weeks at this point, is that being in the headset all day I started to affect her movement in the real world as well. I went to lunch and I tried to grasp the tongs because we always have salad at the front of the salad bar, and I was like trying to grasp it like it was a hologram. It's not that it's not hologram. This is real life. So Selena,
what's the verdict so far? Thus far? Pretty invaluable. I mean, many of the new features in the headset software and hardware were actually developed as a result of this whole spatial rollout. In dog fooding process, they fixed issues ranging from simple bugs set up an installation to actually creating completely new applications. I spoke to the head of legal who said that the companies filed several patents since starting this whole process, but clearly Meta had to slow down
when I got rid of its computer monitors. Was the productivity hit worth it on balance? I think it's a definite yes. I mean pretty early in the process, they realized there actually weren't enough applications in three D, specifically for the holograms. So Meta did this company wide hackathon where they divided everyone into teams and for days did nothing else but brainstorm and create new applications for the headset. So from that keem ideas like the holographic instrument and
three D data plotting tools. And this is only the beginning. I mean, Meta is going to encounter many, many more hurdles as it tries to commercialize as entirely new way to work. Hardware is difficult for startups to get right, definitely, and Met has already experienced some of the struggles. Just a few months ago, the company said it ran into manufacturing delays because of issues scaling at production and processing procedures. And then there's Apple, which is moving forward with its
own competing device. A R has become so big for Apple. Tim Cook, the CEO, recently said to our colleagues at Bloomberg Business Week that he's so excited about the technology he just wants to yell out and scream. Definitely something you don't want to take lightly. And Plus, a big company like Apple is on an advantage with way more cash and many more employees, right, as well as an established network of suppliers and an existing ecosystem of developers.
Any new computing platform will need developers to make new apps and services. Plus, PC sales have been slowing for several years, and even smartphone sales are reaching saturation. So the large tech companies have more at stake than ever to dominate this next wave of computing. So if you don't need monitors, if you can just make do with a R headsets, you probably don't need the same kind of desks we used today either. Right, Medic's actually thinking
about doing a pretty major overhaul at the offices. Instead of a desk, there will be slabs of wood as standing desks. They'd be long but narrow, wide enough for just a keyboard and headset. Wow. So no more cubicles in the offices of the future right ma Room calls
them the tyranny of the modern workplace. Meta wants to get rid of chairs to Actually, it's going to look a lot more like a group of people organically huddling around one hologram and discussing it um a group of people on the other side of the office looking at code collaboratively in a in a group, and not these desks that are separating us. So, Selena, are you excited for the day when we start huddling around holograms instead
of sitting behind our monitors. Well, I think it will be great when the technology actually gets to the place where it's ten times easier than an iPhone. But as the technology is right now, I think I still feel comfortable with the monitor I have today for the type of work that we do as journalists, I don't see it as being exponentially more productive for me to work
with all of these floating monitors. I mean, it would be great for expanding my screens and being able to write this long podcast with unlimited space, but it's definitely still an odd feeling, and I still feel quite attached
to my monitors and my laptop. I guess the question is, will one day it become just cheaper to put on a pair of glasses instead of to buy buy a monitor for for your cubicle but also for your home, right instead of these big flat TVs that can cost on hundreds of dollars, we might just have these floating
virtual screens all around us one day, definitely. I mean Maybrone talks about these headsets being merely strips of glass in just the next few years, So he's definitely expecting this hardware to become commoditized in the very near future. And I mean he thinks it's going to get to a place where it's so much easier and more intuitive to use that you'd want to use it and you'd
want to ditch these old devices. I mean, now it's still attached to a chord, but even the next generation device is supposed to be more mobile, right, it definitely has to become more portable. Do you have any idea when Meta will start selling those headsets in regular stores. I think it's still going to be several years Maybrone is definitely aiming for less than five, but probably not for the next couple of years. And that's it for this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We always like to
hear what you think of the show. You can record a voice message and send it to us that Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at Selena, Underscore Why, Underscore Way, and I'm at brad Stone. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, please leave us a rating in the review. It really helps more listeners find the show. This episode was produced by Pia Gatkari, Liz Smith,
and Magnus Hendrickson. Thanks to Niko Grant first help on today's show. Robin and Yellow edited my print story about Meta, which you can read at Bloomberg dot com slash Tech. Once you're there, you should also check out the video my colleague David Nicholson shot at met his office is to get the full impact of what this technology is like. Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.