The workplace of the future

One demo attracting lines of people all day here at CLOUD CITY was Aurea’s workplace of the future VR set.

Maybe that’s because people like VR, but maybe also because we’re all curious about how the worlds of VR and communication apps are going to coincide in our working lives. One company, Aurea, is thinking this through.

And it’s already on the path to changing how companies with remote and distributed work forces can give their employees more of the experience of being in the office.

We’re working at home now, and we’re used to using Zoom, Teams, Slack, all the apps that keep us connected. But it’s not like working in an office.

Aurea’s Enterprise Work Platform allows employees to view each other’s profiles, what they’re working on, show their interaction history, hang out socially in a more ad hoc manner and join public meetings. It creates complete meetings with the collaborative documents ready to view and work on. It will automatically bring people up to speed with project progress since they were last in work, and deliver transcripts and translations in real time.

All of that leans on shared public cloud-based assets, as well as the public cloud itself, and already gives workers more of an “in the office” experience than sitting on the end of a Slack channel or similar.

But Aurea has a ten year vision that goes much further, using VR to place workers in virtual office spaces, interacting with colleagues in different offices and locations.

An onstand demo shows attendees a potential future world where the virtual office world is more immersive. There’s a lot to do to make it viable, but it’s a 10 year vision that recognises that work is not back to how it was.

Check out Aurea in the online exhibition.