Speaker 1: Stephanie Rosenberg works at a secretive Silicon Valley company called
Speaker 1: Meta in San Mateo, California. Meta is working on a
Speaker 1: new kind of technology called augmented reality. It essentially turns
Speaker 1: a pair of goggles into a projector for holograms. A
Speaker 1: few months ago, Meta decided to do something drastic. The
Speaker 1: company began ripping out its employees desktop computers, making them
Speaker 1: switch to using the company's own headsets. Stephanie was off
Speaker 1: on a work trip at the time, and she was
Speaker 1: in for a big surprise when she returned to the office.
Speaker 1: And I walked in next morning and put my laptop
Speaker 1: bag down and looked up at my desk and realized
Speaker 1: something was missing. Like all of us, Stephanie is used
Speaker 1: to having a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. There was no
Speaker 1: more computer screen on my past i pad. It was
Speaker 1: sitting there. Now. All of Stephanie's daily work, like writing emails,
Speaker 1: making presentations, and monitoring social media happen inside an augmented
Speaker 1: reality headset. Then I looked around and other members of
Speaker 1: my team were, uh, you know, reaching out and moving
Speaker 1: things around in the air there in the headset. Stephanie
Speaker 1: had no choice but to get used to the change
Speaker 1: since those desktop monitors aren't coming back. That's because Meta
Speaker 1: believes its headsets are going to radically change how we
Speaker 1: spend our time at work, spending on a future where
Speaker 1: your desktop will be as obsolete as a typewriter. Hi,
Speaker 1: I'm Bradstone and I'm Selena Way, and this week on Decrypted,
Speaker 1: we'll take a look into what the future of work
Speaker 1: might look like through one startups experiments with augmented reality.
Speaker 1: Augmented reality is still at a very early stage of development,
Speaker 1: and Meta is up against tech giants like Microsoft and
Speaker 1: Apple that are investing heavily and developing their own headsets
Speaker 1: that compete with metas product one forecast as the global
Speaker 1: a R market could be worth a hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: five billion dollars by two thousand and twenty four. I'll
Speaker 1: go behind the scenes to see how the transition has
Speaker 1: gone at Meta and see for myself what it's like
Speaker 1: to work with three D holograms. Stay with us, so, Selena,
Speaker 1: I remember the first time I came across Meta. It
Speaker 1: was February two thousand sixteen at the TED conference in Vancouver,
Speaker 1: and I have to say this has only happened to
Speaker 1: me a few times. In my career covering technology. I
Speaker 1: put on the Meta glasses, I saw you a virtual
Speaker 1: monitor in front of me. I think they had the
Speaker 1: Bloomberg terminal on the screen, and I was like, Wow, this,
Speaker 1: if it works, will change everything. And I remember shortly
Speaker 1: after that conference, you told me to start digging into
Speaker 1: this company. And I went back and listened to that
Speaker 1: TED conference and I noticed it was then that may
Speaker 1: Ron Gribbets, the CEO, made this very daring promise, which
Speaker 1: is why all hundred of us at Meta, including the
Speaker 1: administrative staff, the executives, the designers and engineers before, we're
Speaker 1: all going to be throwing away our external monitors and
Speaker 1: replacing them with a truly and profoundly more natural machine.
Speaker 1: And Meta has seriously followed through on that goal. Marone
Speaker 1: is only thirty one years old and he founded Meta
Speaker 1: in after studying neuroscience and computer science at Columbia University.
Speaker 1: He made the first Meta prototype with an oven heated
Speaker 1: knife and hot glue gun the same year that he
Speaker 1: founded the startup, and last year, Meta raised fifty million
Speaker 1: dollars from investors like Lenovo and ten Cent. Today, Meta
Speaker 1: is targeting its headsets at developers and companies and industries
Speaker 1: like design and manufacturing. The current headset costs ninety nine
Speaker 1: dollars and they're expecting more than ten thousand people to
Speaker 1: be using it by the end of the year. A
Speaker 1: R will eventually supplant replace the phone and the tablet
Speaker 1: and the computer entirely. Here my own standing in his
Speaker 1: futuristic looking office with tall glass windows in a thin
Speaker 1: slap of wood as his standing desk. He's wearing his
Speaker 1: usual jeans, T shirt and blazer. People will have strips
Speaker 1: of glass that from the front perspective will look very
Speaker 1: much like the glasses I have on. That will be
Speaker 1: able to do everything that a computer, a tablet or
Speaker 1: a phone will be able to do, and a whole
Speaker 1: lot more so. Augmented reality is a new frontier for computing. Now,
Speaker 1: this is not virtual reality. When you put the goggles on,
Speaker 1: you still see the world around you, but you can
Speaker 1: also see images that are generated inside the headset overlaid
Speaker 1: on top of reality. That's why it's also sometimes called
Speaker 1: mixed reality. And this experiment going on at met At
Speaker 1: the company calls it dog footing. In fact, John Signs,
Speaker 1: who's the company CFO, did the nearly forty years ago
Speaker 1: at a different company. Back then, he was making people
Speaker 1: switch from typewriters to desktops. The idea is that by
Speaker 1: using its own product, Meta will work through bugs and
Speaker 1: kinks and improve its product faster than competitors, So you're
Speaker 1: gonna get ten x more of the feedback then you
Speaker 1: would have otherwise gotten through from your customers before your
Speaker 1: customers even get it, which is important because there are
Speaker 1: much bigger companies like Microsoft and Apple working on their
Speaker 1: own augmented reality products. But the much bigger idea was,
Speaker 1: if we're all going to use the spatial office, the
Speaker 1: holographic office first, we were going to find those killer
Speaker 1: apps and build them and refine them way before anyone.
Speaker 1: And by the way, the concept of the spatial office
Speaker 1: is something will come back to later because working with
Speaker 1: the three D holograms means a physical office could look
Speaker 1: totally different that his office looks like your typical startup.
Speaker 1: There's plenty of snacks and every type of drink imaginable,
Speaker 1: from kombucha on tap to coconut water. There's even a
Speaker 1: band area set up in the cafeteria from Promptu performances. Still,
Speaker 1: it was startling to see a room full of people
Speaker 1: wearing these futuristic looking headsets going about their work as
Speaker 1: if it's totally ordinary. One very new employee, Liz o Wart,
Speaker 1: says she felt the same way. We've all seen Minority Report,
Speaker 1: and we've seen people interacting with holograms, and it was
Speaker 1: really such an interesting experience to walk into an office
Speaker 1: environment and see people in my future colleagues actually in
Speaker 1: the headset doing the things that they would be doing
Speaker 1: every day. I wasn't expecting to see so much physical movement.
Speaker 1: People were grabbing empty space, rotating their hands in the air,
Speaker 1: and pushing air with their arms. Some people were even
Speaker 1: turning all the way around them, placing holographic objects behind them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I saw the video that our colleague David Nicholson shot
Speaker 1: at Meta's offices. It looks totally bizarre. I mean, without
Speaker 1: any context, you would think that you're watching some kind
Speaker 1: of performance. Are there something from a sci fi movie? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And the MET headset itself wraps all the way around
Speaker 1: your head and at the front has this sort of visor. Right,
Speaker 1: the optical element as they call it, sits in the
Speaker 1: headset and is projected onto the visor. The sides of
Speaker 1: the headset are embossed in brown leather, and there's a
Speaker 1: strap over the top of your head to kind of
Speaker 1: balance out the weight. Their sensors on the headset and
Speaker 1: a front facing camera, but it's pretty light, not too heavy,
Speaker 1: about a pound. It's a different world going from the
Speaker 1: two D rail to the three D world. That was
Speaker 1: Liz again. I was shot three that I would be
Speaker 1: wearing it. I had the chance to try the headset
Speaker 1: myself with Ryan Pamplin, whose main role at META is
Speaker 1: to get people more interested in using augmented reality. He's
Speaker 1: twenty nine. He takes the headset everywhere, even on the airplane.
Speaker 1: His office is also impeccably clean, a white desk with
Speaker 1: nothing on it except the headset and a keyboard. But
Speaker 1: inside the headset, his office looks much different. There's a
Speaker 1: lot more decoration in my version of my office than
Speaker 1: in yours. Brian's holographic office was full of personal photos
Speaker 1: scattered all around in the air, in front of multiple
Speaker 1: floating screens and little three D holographic figurines around his desk.
Speaker 1: There's also things I wouldn't put in my real office
Speaker 1: that I have in here, Like I I wouldn't have
Speaker 1: all the pictures of my girlfriend and I like plastered everywhere.
Speaker 1: And I probably wouldn't have a bust of Steve jobs
Speaker 1: because I don't know where to buy one of those.
Speaker 1: And can you hear anything? Yes, there was actually Katie
Speaker 1: Perry music playing, but I couldn't tell where it was
Speaker 1: coming from. But then I swiveled the chair around and
Speaker 1: saw that Ryan had placed the YouTube music video web
Speaker 1: page right behind me. Turns out there were also many
Speaker 1: other strange holographic objects behind me as well. And then
Speaker 1: over here you have the workspace, which is the shelf
Speaker 1: you see, so why don't you try and grab the instrument.
Speaker 1: It's the sort of rainbow ball that shelf I saw
Speaker 1: part of metas workspace. It's the equivalent of what you
Speaker 1: see when you first power on your computer. It's the
Speaker 1: desktop setting that's typically a bunch of icons and folders
Speaker 1: you click into to access your work. So you can
Speaker 1: take your hand to put that and just put it
Speaker 1: flat in front of you. See a We'll circle around
Speaker 1: your hand when it's in the right place. Maybe you
Speaker 1: need to be a little closer m and just close
Speaker 1: your fist on it, and now you can pull it out.
Speaker 1: Oh got it? Interesting? It's in colorful or and now
Speaker 1: go ahead and play it with your fingers. So this
Speaker 1: is how I relieve stress and make beautiful music. This
Speaker 1: is wild. Everyone I spoke to at Metasine, the biggest
Speaker 1: productivity gain was being able to have an unlimited number
Speaker 1: of screens that you could scale as large as you
Speaker 1: wanted to. It's kind of like having your own command
Speaker 1: center where you arrange things three D sixty degrees around
Speaker 1: you and pull objects to your attention right when you
Speaker 1: need them. Interesting, So how easy is it to move
Speaker 1: these three D objects around? It definitely took me if
Speaker 1: you tries to figure out how to move them around,
Speaker 1: how to learned how to position my hands so that
Speaker 1: the technology would track my hands and allow me to
Speaker 1: enlarge and move or rotate the holographic object. But I'm
Speaker 1: sure the demo you tested fixed many of the kinks
Speaker 1: that employees must have suffered through in the early days. Right, definitely,
Speaker 1: and Meta is transition across the workplace has been far
Speaker 1: from smooth. I was extremely nervous about this. I was
Speaker 1: extremely I mean it's it's you're going against fifty years
Speaker 1: of computing tools in one year, as with any major
Speaker 1: change at work, meta Is transition to three D headsets
Speaker 1: has at times been challenging. Meta started giving out the
Speaker 1: headsets at the end of March, and they started with
Speaker 1: the engineers. They make up one of the largest teams
Speaker 1: with the highest pressure deadlines. In retrospect, it may have
Speaker 1: been a mistake to start there, so that rollout went
Speaker 1: a little out of hand. This is Cecilia, a body
Speaker 1: a product manager, like, we didn't get as much used
Speaker 1: as we wanted. The feedback was a little segmented, like
Speaker 1: people will find one problem and put it down. Basically,
Speaker 1: the engineers complained and we're frustrated that they couldn't get
Speaker 1: their work done on time without their regular PC monitors.
Speaker 1: We know there's a heat on productivity at the beginnings,
Speaker 1: and it's okay, Like, it's completely okay that the first
Speaker 1: days that you use the workspace and the environment on
Speaker 1: a r you're going to be less productive than your
Speaker 1: normal work. It's an investment. It's something you have to
Speaker 1: do so that you find all the problems, so that
Speaker 1: you build all the things that you need to have.
Speaker 1: The transition caused so many issues eventually that Meta decided
Speaker 1: to give the engineers back their desktop computers and transition
Speaker 1: smaller groups at a slower pace. They started with the marketing, sales,
Speaker 1: and general and administrative departments, so they're the guinea pigs.
Speaker 1: So what were their experiences like? So I've been regularly
Speaker 1: checking in with a few of the employees trying to
Speaker 1: track their experiences. They've raised a pretty interesting set of issues.
Speaker 1: Wanted the complain was maneuvering the floating screen so that
Speaker 1: they were in just the perfect places, or dealing with
Speaker 1: how natural light affects the viewability of the holograms. Not
Speaker 1: your normal set of workplace complaints. I don't think at
Speaker 1: the beginning, it was very simple things that were pretty frustrating.
Speaker 1: I found, for instance, that Ergo headset didn't match my
Speaker 1: particular head shape, so I actually just attached the weight
Speaker 1: onto the back to make it so it was more
Speaker 1: comfortable to me. It's just a new way of dealing
Speaker 1: with issues. I found reading for long period of time
Speaker 1: to be difficult for me personally. So Selena, how is
Speaker 1: meta measuring whether or not this workplace switched to augmented
Speaker 1: reality headsets is actually helping the company. They have a
Speaker 1: team of neuroscientists that are collecting data points and productivity
Speaker 1: changes like visual perception, speed of interaction, and physical comfort.
Speaker 1: That is also encouraging employees to write daily logs. I
Speaker 1: give feedback on this whole experience, and clearly there was
Speaker 1: a lot of feedback. So how fast are they fixing
Speaker 1: these problems? It really just depends on how complicated it is,
Speaker 1: but for most things it's actually very fast since there's
Speaker 1: this constant interaction between the teams. When I first started
Speaker 1: my role out, there was a little bit of jitter,
Speaker 1: which means it kind of sort of shakes a little
Speaker 1: bit in the spot. But then with the last update
Speaker 1: that I got about a week in a hospital that
Speaker 1: was gone, they just kissed updating that algorithms. Esther lee
Speaker 1: Q is an industrial designer whose job is to create
Speaker 1: what the next generation of the headset is going to
Speaker 1: look like. So she's actually one of the employees who
Speaker 1: found the transition quite helpful. Very early on, I really
Speaker 1: enjoyed using the headset for reviews with our CEO Moron,
Speaker 1: and that's just been like nine and day of being
Speaker 1: able to communicate my ideas. Having a physical, three dimensional
Speaker 1: hologram that we can all look at and review. It's
Speaker 1: just taken away so much confusion from looking at a
Speaker 1: two drawing. According to Mayro and the CEO, the hardest
Speaker 1: part of the transition actually had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: the technology. The technology is probably the easiest thing to
Speaker 1: get done. We got the photo realism, we got most
Speaker 1: of the kinks of the ergonomics. Guess what the hardest
Speaker 1: part was. It was to get people to want to
Speaker 1: give up the tools that they love, especially software engineers
Speaker 1: and and folks that have habituated to be surrounded by
Speaker 1: these these monitors. Um, they've grown connected to them, and
Speaker 1: now parting with them was It was a real emotional
Speaker 1: journey for a lot of people. Once employees got over
Speaker 1: that initial hurdle, they told me that work became a
Speaker 1: whole new kind of immersion they've never experienced before. You
Speaker 1: definitely forget about it off the first sort of five
Speaker 1: minutes of having it all That was Karas O'Connell met
Speaker 1: as director of User Experience, and I found myself for
Speaker 1: getting I've gotten on and leaning in towards, um, you
Speaker 1: know something, I'm trying to look out on my desk
Speaker 1: and accidentally head pupping the desk. So this was an
Speaker 1: interesting thing to hear about. The challenge is going back
Speaker 1: to the normal world. You sort of have to go
Speaker 1: through a decompression almost to go back to these rectangles.
Speaker 1: Adjusting to the real world after you've been inside the
Speaker 1: headset for some time can be very difficult. Suddenly everything
Speaker 1: seems very small. With that. I pick up my iPhone
Speaker 1: and I sort of squinting at it after being in
Speaker 1: the headset for a while, and suddenly the irony is
Speaker 1: the old things don't make sense anymore, and You're like, Wow,
Speaker 1: why is this so small? I can't believe we have
Speaker 1: such small rectangles around us all the time. Liz, who
Speaker 1: has only been using the headset for a few weeks
Speaker 1: at this point, is that being in the headset all
Speaker 1: day I started to affect her movement in the real
Speaker 1: world as well. I went to lunch and I tried
Speaker 1: to grasp the tongs because we always have salad at
Speaker 1: the front of the salad bar, and I was like
Speaker 1: trying to grasp it like it was a hologram. It's
Speaker 1: not that it's not hologram. This is real life. So Selena,
Speaker 1: what's the verdict so far? Thus far? Pretty invaluable. I mean,
Speaker 1: many of the new features in the headset software and
Speaker 1: hardware were actually developed as a result of this whole
Speaker 1: spatial rollout. In dog fooding process, they fixed issues ranging
Speaker 1: from simple bugs set up an installation to actually creating
Speaker 1: completely new applications. I spoke to the head of legal
Speaker 1: who said that the companies filed several patents since starting
Speaker 1: this whole process, but clearly Meta had to slow down
Speaker 1: when I got rid of its computer monitors. Was the
Speaker 1: productivity hit worth it on balance? I think it's a
Speaker 1: definite yes. I mean pretty early in the process, they
Speaker 1: realized there actually weren't enough applications in three D, specifically
Speaker 1: for the holograms. So Meta did this company wide hackathon
Speaker 1: where they divided everyone into teams and for days did
Speaker 1: nothing else but brainstorm and create new applications for the headset.
Speaker 1: So from that keem ideas like the holographic instrument and
Speaker 1: three D data plotting tools. And this is only the beginning.
Speaker 1: I mean, Meta is going to encounter many, many more
Speaker 1: hurdles as it tries to commercialize as entirely new way
Speaker 1: to work. Hardware is difficult for startups to get right, definitely,
Speaker 1: and Met has already experienced some of the struggles. Just
Speaker 1: a few months ago, the company said it ran into
Speaker 1: manufacturing delays because of issues scaling at production and processing procedures.
Speaker 1: And then there's Apple, which is moving forward with its
Speaker 1: own competing device. A R has become so big for Apple.
Speaker 1: Tim Cook, the CEO, recently said to our colleagues at
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Business Week that he's so excited about the technology
Speaker 1: he just wants to yell out and scream. Definitely something
Speaker 1: you don't want to take lightly. And Plus, a big
Speaker 1: company like Apple is on an advantage with way more
Speaker 1: cash and many more employees, right, as well as an
Speaker 1: established network of suppliers and an existing ecosystem of developers.
Speaker 1: Any new computing platform will need developers to make new
Speaker 1: apps and services. Plus, PC sales have been slowing for
Speaker 1: several years, and even smartphone sales are reaching saturation. So
Speaker 1: the large tech companies have more at stake than ever
Speaker 1: to dominate this next wave of computing. So if you
Speaker 1: don't need monitors, if you can just make do with
Speaker 1: a R headsets, you probably don't need the same kind
Speaker 1: of desks we used today either. Right, Medic's actually thinking
Speaker 1: about doing a pretty major overhaul at the offices. Instead
Speaker 1: of a desk, there will be slabs of wood as
Speaker 1: standing desks. They'd be long but narrow, wide enough for
Speaker 1: just a keyboard and headset. Wow. So no more cubicles
Speaker 1: in the offices of the future right ma Room calls
Speaker 1: them the tyranny of the modern workplace. Meta wants to
Speaker 1: get rid of chairs to Actually, it's going to look
Speaker 1: a lot more like a group of people organically huddling
Speaker 1: around one hologram and discussing it um a group of
Speaker 1: people on the other side of the office looking at
Speaker 1: code collaboratively in a in a group, and not these
Speaker 1: desks that are separating us. So, Selena, are you excited
Speaker 1: for the day when we start huddling around holograms instead
Speaker 1: of sitting behind our monitors. Well, I think it will
Speaker 1: be great when the technology actually gets to the place
Speaker 1: where it's ten times easier than an iPhone. But as
Speaker 1: the technology is right now, I think I still feel
Speaker 1: comfortable with the monitor I have today for the type
Speaker 1: of work that we do as journalists, I don't see
Speaker 1: it as being exponentially more productive for me to work
Speaker 1: with all of these floating monitors. I mean, it would
Speaker 1: be great for expanding my screens and being able to
Speaker 1: write this long podcast with unlimited space, but it's definitely
Speaker 1: still an odd feeling, and I still feel quite attached
Speaker 1: to my monitors and my laptop. I guess the question is,
Speaker 1: will one day it become just cheaper to put on
Speaker 1: a pair of glasses instead of to buy buy a
Speaker 1: monitor for for your cubicle but also for your home,
Speaker 1: right instead of these big flat TVs that can cost
Speaker 1: on hundreds of dollars, we might just have these floating
Speaker 1: virtual screens all around us one day, definitely. I mean
Speaker 1: Maybrone talks about these headsets being merely strips of glass
Speaker 1: in just the next few years, So he's definitely expecting
Speaker 1: this hardware to become commoditized in the very near future.
Speaker 1: And I mean he thinks it's going to get to
Speaker 1: a place where it's so much easier and more intuitive
Speaker 1: to use that you'd want to use it and you'd
Speaker 1: want to ditch these old devices. I mean, now it's
Speaker 1: still attached to a chord, but even the next generation
Speaker 1: device is supposed to be more mobile, right, it definitely
Speaker 1: has to become more portable. Do you have any idea
Speaker 1: when Meta will start selling those headsets in regular stores.
Speaker 1: I think it's still going to be several years Maybrone
Speaker 1: is definitely aiming for less than five, but probably not
Speaker 1: for the next couple of years. And that's it for
Speaker 1: this week's Decrypted. Thanks for listening. We always like to
Speaker 1: hear what you think of the show. You can record
Speaker 1: a voice message and send it to us that Decrypted
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at Selena,
Speaker 1: Underscore Why, Underscore Way, and I'm at brad Stone. If
Speaker 1: you haven't already, please subscribe to our show wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. While you're there, please leave us a
Speaker 1: rating in the review. It really helps more listeners find
Speaker 1: the show. This episode was produced by Pia Gatkari, Liz Smith,
Speaker 1: and Magnus Hendrickson. Thanks to Niko Grant first help on
Speaker 1: today's show. Robin and Yellow edited my print story about Meta,
Speaker 1: which you can read at Bloomberg dot com slash Tech.
Speaker 1: Once you're there, you should also check out the video
Speaker 1: my colleague David Nicholson shot at met his office is
Speaker 1: to get the full impact of what this technology is like.
Speaker 1: Alec McCabe is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you
Speaker 1: next week.