I get up every morning, I get in my car and I drive to work. I’ve got a couple of monitors there, a laptop and some coffee.
It’s been like that for a while now. I remember the big CRT monitors before that, and I’ve worked for one company where I had four of the beasts warming my face on a daily basis.
But things are changing, and we’re really not that far away from cars taking us to work without our input. My journey is 90% “A roads” and motorways. Long, straight and pretty tedious. Average speed-check cameras keep me rigidly stuck at one speed and traffic lights ensure that traffic flows in a regimented fashion. A computer could do that for me. I don’t mind driving the first mile and then letting it take control, because I really don’t get that “driving feeling” that the car adverts would have you believe.
So, move the clock forward a few years and imagine that your “pod” has taken you to your place of work. What now? Do you still have two big screens, a mouse and a keyboard? Well no. We’ve already moved away from that on a phone, so it probably won’t be too long before we’re properly interacting with a computer by using gestures. We’ll be sitting down and strapping a VR headset to our face. We’ll have a massive virtual screen or two and we’ll be able to work without distractions in a huge and all-encompassing environment.
Welcome to the start of that. This is Virtual Desktop…
Designed for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive it’ll be release in just days. As you can see, you can blend your screen in with the background and you can have multiple screens. At home you can browse the web on it, play games and watch movies (although I’m not a fan of watching films on my own). Further details are abvailable here and there’s a raft of settings which you can tweak to get it working just as you want.
Imagine it. Your email on one screen, your other stuff on another. You look down and, perhaps you’ll have a keyboard attached to your chair as it rotates. Perhaps it’s a real one, perhaps not. Perhaps you’ll have a mouse. Perhaps you’ll have electronic gloves to track your fingers. Then, from off the side of your virtual desktop, a call comes in – you look to the right and you can see a picture of who’s calling. You hear their voice, you speak back. Then, after hanging up the call, a meeting notification appears across both screens, and you’re instantly transported to a virtual meeting room where you can see the people you need to and you can participate in the entire meeting without moving from your chair.
It’s coming. Believe it. It’s coming.