I recently had a friendly debate about this with a friend (ex-Yahoo of the golden years). The interesting thing is that a distributed organization, such as Yahoo or Google, or pretty much any multi-national, telecommuting is already in their work practices - whenever you have to coordinate across office locations, you are effectively telecommuting to that office.
However, that's not the interesting part of the conversation. What we pretty much both agreed on is that as the technology progresses, what we term in person interactions will change drastically. Today, when we talk about virtual reality, we are still bound in our conduits into that world.
Imagine if we had the ability to completely immerse ourselves into a virtual reality, Matrix-style. In that world, your commute is nothing more than going to a chair and loading the program. From there, you can appear anywhere in that virtual reality. It can be in the shape of an office, or a green field with desks, or no desk, pretty much anything the organization/group of people wants. With the totality of human senses present, neither of us debating the issue could see anything missing that a physical presence would provide.
Throw in the current trend of shrinking employment, and the future of the office buildings in the next few hundred years seems to be in question.
Technologically, we are not there yet and it's not clear if this will happen in our lifetime. However, it no longer feels like a pure sci-fi notion.
In my opinion we're actually a lot closer to it than most people may realize. I think virtual-offices are going to be a reality in 3-5 years. This will be driven by a few key technologies that are coming out in that timeframe:
Oculus Rift - fully immersive digital environment
Leapmotion/Kinect - natural UI for interacting in 3D
Google Fiber - high-speed bandwidth networks
Modern GPUs - can already produce movie-level graphics in realtime.
In fact, I could see the first prototype virtual offices being released within 18 months.
I agree with you that this is certainly going to happen soon-ish, but 3-5 years is wildly optimistic, particularly when it comes to the Leapmotion/Kinect (which are cool, but a long way away from resulting in realistic 3D interaction) and Google Fiber (only applies if we all move to Kansas City -- I know Google plans to roll this out to other markets, but in 3-5 years I wouldn't expect significant progress, maybe 1 or 2 other metro areas max).
Conceptually I agree with you, but the challenge is that there are signals transmitted between people in the same room that don't come through electronics well.
I'm talking about all of the non-verbal signals that feed back into your visual cortex without you even realizing it. Things that inspire you to follow someone, or realize they aren't understanding you, or that you are offending them, or that they don't themselves believe what they are saying.
Lots of human factors work has gone into this and we don't have a clue yet how to transmit that stuff much less render it in a virtual world. I expect we will get there, but its an area that I am not seeing much in the press about.
Would love Trevor to jump in here with what they've been learning with the AnyBot with regards to present/not-present sort of work.
That's true, but the constraints and nature of the medium open up new avenues of expression. We're not likely to catch subtle facial expressions-- or, for that matter, smells and touch-- for a long time, but we'll gain incredible new powers in the mean-time.
I'm thinking gesture capture (hands and body) and words/sounds in a virtual environment. You can fluidly interpret those inputs into sights and sounds which illustrate ideas. It won't be intimate in a physical sense, but it will be extremely expressive, and that's what the office needs.
However, that's not the interesting part of the conversation. What we pretty much both agreed on is that as the technology progresses, what we term in person interactions will change drastically. Today, when we talk about virtual reality, we are still bound in our conduits into that world.
Imagine if we had the ability to completely immerse ourselves into a virtual reality, Matrix-style. In that world, your commute is nothing more than going to a chair and loading the program. From there, you can appear anywhere in that virtual reality. It can be in the shape of an office, or a green field with desks, or no desk, pretty much anything the organization/group of people wants. With the totality of human senses present, neither of us debating the issue could see anything missing that a physical presence would provide.
Throw in the current trend of shrinking employment, and the future of the office buildings in the next few hundred years seems to be in question.
Technologically, we are not there yet and it's not clear if this will happen in our lifetime. However, it no longer feels like a pure sci-fi notion.