For many of us, the humble office is where we work and meet with colleagues and business partners to do business and achieve organizational goals. But why do we still arrive and leave at a certain time, and why should we even have desks?
The reason for many is habit, it is something that we have always done and there is comfort in the familiar. But times are changing and so are the habits. Offices are built to encourage collaboration. Meeting rooms exist to encourage cooperation and team-building. We stick to rigid hours so that anyone we need to talk to about an issue is there for it to be dealt with.
Collaboration is key to successful business
In some ways, the office of the future has already arrived, and as William Gibson would say, it is not evenly distributed. According to Mark Bridgeman, Managing Director of EON Reality UK, collaboration has gone beyond the idea of real time co-working thanks to virtual, augmented and mixed reality.
“Enterprise sectors from aerospace to warehousing to manufacturing, are already deploying mixed reality to deliver hands-on training and creating custom workspaces,” he says.
“A training manager could be anywhere in the world, teaching practical lessons and experiencing every move their trainees’ experience, monitoring results and interacting with them individually, even though they’re all thousands of miles apart. And that isn’t contained in one place. That’s across mobile, group and immersive systems.”
