One recent morning, Stephanie Rosenburg arrived at work to find her PC monitor had vanished. She looked around the office and saw that members of her team were wearing headsets with see-through visors and grabbing invisible objects with their hands. Rosenburg had just returned from vacation so it took her a few seconds to process what was happening before she clued in: "Oh," she thought. "It's my turn now."
Rosenburg handles marketing for Meta, a San Francisco startup that makes augmented reality headsets that overlay holographic images on the real world. Users can manipulate 3D models with their hands or browse web pages, send emails and write code from floating virtual screens.
Her boss, Meta founder and Chief Executive Officer Meron Gribetz, is determined to end what he calls the "tyranny of the modern office" by replacing monitors, keyboards and eventually even cubicles with augmented reality.
When Gribetz revealed the plan last year at the TED Conference in Vancouver, he was under no illusions about the challenge. "I was extremely nervous about this," he recalls. "You're going against 50 years of computing tools."
Gribetz, 31, founded Meta in 2012 after studying neuroscience and computer science at Columbia University. He made the first Meta prototype with an oven-heated knife and hot glue gun. Last year, Meta raised $50 million (roughly Rs. 322 crores) from investors like Lenovo Group[1] and Tencent Holdings[2]. Today, its devices are used by developers and companies-ranging from architects to designers to auto manufacturers. By year-end, Meta expects more than 10,000 people will be using the $949 headset.
Meta's goal is to make its augmented reality technology a seamless extension of the real world-enabling people to interact with holograms much the way one interacts with...