Much has been written on the future of work, especially with AI and Machine Learning automating more and more jobs. At Inovia Capital we’ve looked at the future through the lens of more decentralized ecosystems which favor more loosely connected organizations:
- More jobs will involve personalized, non-repetitive, ‘human’ skills carried out in less structured environments (work from home, remote maintenance, ride share, online education, etc.).
- Technology will enable better matching of supply and demand for skills; instead of matching needs within a small set of local companies, people can utilize their expertise across large ecosystems, regardless of geography.
An implication of this is that more and more work will be done from remote physical locations, and will therefore require higher degrees of fidelity in our communications — work that involves more personalized skills applied from a distance will also demand more nuanced technologies, more realistic social interactions, and better work spaces. We’ve seen this evolution over the last twenty years, with the advent of remote conferencing systems and interaction spaces. This trend will continue.
From a technology standpoint, we anticipate a quantum improvement in future work environments as we move from flat, 2D interactions, into 3D spatial environments. These new environments will help break down the geographic barriers that currently exist, leading to the ability to work from anywhere, anytime without sacrificing human interactions and connections. These new environments will be used for education, for training, for brainstorming, for planning, for ad-hoc jobs, and for long-term research efforts.
With Spatial.is we are investing in building those new interaction spaces. By analogy, the transition from working in a single dimension (MS-DOS terminal, for example) to the second dimension (Windows, Mac-OS) had an immense impact on how work was carried out. Moving from having just a cursor and a keyboard, to also having a mouse, windows, scroll bars, and icons was a fundamental shift. It enabled better document systems, spreadsheets, web sites and applications. Trying to live within a one dimensional terminal screen would now be unthinkable. Likewise, the move to the third dimension is going to not only change how we interact with existing content, it is going to spur an entirely new generation of applications and models. What are the scroll bars and icons of 3D?
In the founders of Spatial.is we discovered people with amazing backgrounds in 3D interaction spaces and a compelling vision for how to bring this nascent space to life. They are not simply moving 2D objects into a 3D space, or using virtual reality or games to envision the future. Instead they are defining, from the bottom up, what it means to work and live in three dimensions, at the nexus of physical and virtual, and how we will all be more productive in that space.
Better mixed reality headsets are coming; higher bandwidth and lower latency networks are being built as we speak. It is not a matter of if this new mode of interaction space will emerge, it is simply a matter of when.
This is, of course, very cool technology — but it is more important than that. By making these spaces compelling, by increasing their usability and fidelity, we can help unleash the future of work. And that is worth investing in.