WorkSpace Wednesday: Planning for Immersive MeetingsWorkSpace Wednesday: Planning for Immersive Meetings
With a hybrid workweek the way of the future, the video meeting experience will inevitably need to get more immersive.
November 18, 2020
For many enterprise IT professionals, video meetings are very much top of mind these days. Turns out, the same can be said of the folks behind office design and architecture.
As I discussed earlier this week on our sister site, WorkSpace Connect, the evolving video meeting experience was among a variety of discussion points raised among office design experts during the recent “Beyond 2020: Designing for the Future of Work” webinar hosted by PLASTARC, a social research, workplace innovation, and real estate strategy firm. On their minds is how to support the video meeting experience of the future, which they anticipate being far more immersive than it is today.
Technology wise, the immersive video experience of the future will require the use of larger screens, bigger speakers, better microphones, and more control over lighting and other room systems, said Bob Fox, chairman and principal at FOX Architects and founder of Work Design Magazine.
Nick LiVigne, head of product at Convene, a meeting, event, and office space provider, agreed, pointing out the importance of enabling immersive video meeting in support of far-flung participants. A part in-office, part remote workweek is likely to be the long-term road ahead for many people, so hybrid participation needs to be “at the very center of the design process,” enabling equal engagement independent of location, he said.
Unknowns remain, to be sure, LiVigne added, “but it’s very clear that this hybrid work environment is going to be the next phase of what all of us have imagined for a very long time about truly immersive physical and digital experiences.”
Meanwhile, Fox encouraged designers to take inspiration from the experiential designs found in modern museum exhibits. “If you look at the user experience design world of today, and then take that into a world that becomes three dimensional, I think that’s where we’re ultimately going to be heading,” he said.
To back up that assertion, Fox pointed to spatial work that Microsoft and others are doing, as well as to the use of avatars. “Those things are going to continue to grow and evolve, and they’ll become fully integrated into the workplace.”
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