Here's why the future of productivity would inevitably be driven by augmented reality

Think of your ideal workspace. You’d love an office with a view, a massive screen to work on, maybe a fish tank beside you and some light music playing in the background. Wouldn’t that be nice? Think of how you collaborate today. You share a document on Google Docs or its equivalent, indulge in a flurry of email and chat and then, finally, you get somewhere.

Now imagine your world in AR or VR. You can be sitting in the dingiest of cubicles and yet work in the world of your dreams. You can have that humungous monitor you want, more than one if you feel like it; you can feed those virtual fish from time to time and even have the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra playing in the background without disturbing anyone else.

Collaboration? As Zuckerberg demoed at Oculus Connect , you and your co-workers can just pop into a Room of your choosing and discuss whatever’s on your mind. You can pull up a virtual whiteboard and doodle on it; throw a virtual glass at a virtual wall in anger or bang your fist on the table to emphasise a point. Your emotions need not be held back. Now wouldn’t that be nice? A study conducted by Jody Medich, formerly of Leap Motion and currently Director of Design and Singularity University concluded that organising things spatially results in a 40 percent increase in productivity. In our increasingly constricted future, it’s hard to imagine anything but AR or VR remedying this situation.

Do you remember this scene form The Matrix Reloaded? It’s the perfect example of what I’m trying to illustrate. Why limit yourself by your surroundings? Augmented Reality solutions at this scale are far from feasible or affordable at this time. The HoloLens and Oculus Room demos that we’ve seen are bringing us a taste of this enhanced reality, however. It’ll be years before we see any headway in this field, decades even, but it will happen. As Agent Smith would say, “It is inevitable.”