Gates Package — page 1192

approach to remote work. Maybe you have one team try one configuration while a different team tries another, so that you can compare the results and find the right balance for everyone. (It's worth repeating that I'm talking about office jobs. The pandemic disrupted work in virtually every industry. There are huge sectors of the economy where things won't change as much or will change in different ways from what I'm describing here.) I'm also really interested in how technology can create more spontaneity with remote work, moving forward. This is the biggest thing you lose when you're not in the office. Let's say you used to work in an open space with six other people. You could look up at any time and see what they were up to. You could tell whether they felt like talking, giving you advice, or just taking a break to chat about nonwork stuff. That kind of spontaneous interaction stopped when many of us began working from home--you aren't exactly going to have an unplanned conversation with a colleague about your last meeting in your living room. But there are a lot of innovations in the pipeline to replicate that experience at home. If you had a second screen that was very cheap and a physical place to put it, you could have a feed of all six of you sitting in your home offices working. You could look at the screen to see what everyone is doing (except when someone wants privacy and turns the camera off). When someone seems like they're free to talk, you could just click on their video, zoom in, and start chatting. This isn't radically different from how collaboration tools work today, and it's something we have the bandwidth and software power to do now. I think we'll soon start to see an even bigger shift. People shouldn't assume that the quality of the software that lets you have virtual experiences will stay the same. The acceleration of innovation is just starting. Within the next two or three years, I predict most virtual meetings will move from 2D camera image grids--which I call the Hollywood Squares model, although I know that probably dates me--to the metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars. Both Facebook and Microsoft recently unveiled their visions for this, which gave most people their first view of what it will look like. The idea is that you will eventually use your avatar to meet with people in a virtual space that replicates the feeling of being in an actual room with them. To do this, you'll need something like VR goggles and motion capture gloves to accurately capture your expressions, body language, and the quality of your voice. Most people don't own these tools yet, which will slow adoption somewhat. (One of the things that enabled the rapid change to video meetings was the fact that many people already had PCs or phones with cameras.) Microsoft plans to roll out an interim version next year, which uses your webcam to animate an avatar that's used in the current 2D setup.