The Solution: Breaking Free from Desk-Bound Productivity

The future of work isn't about better desks—it's about breaking free from desks altogether.

Sitting at a desk is bad. Standing at a desk is bad. Walking at a desk is not a practical enough solution, and it is not possible to be productive without being at a desk.

In order to reverse the sedentary spiral, humans need to break free from desks altogether - at least for significant chunks of time. Doing so is an immensely complex, multi-faceted endeavor, as humans are tied to their desks due to a lack of suitable technological options beyond a computer hooked up to one or more monitors. A phone is suitable for certain tasks, such as taking calls or sending light emails, but lack of screen space is a severe limitation - the majority of tasks require workers to have access to their important apps, files, and information, and the screen space that their computer and monitors provide to practically do their jobs.

But a complementary piece of technology is missing from the equation. One that:

• Provides humans with a suitable way to accomplish a significant subset of tasks on the go
• Combines the convenience and portability of the smartphone with the screen space to have the ability to easily pull up and view necessary materials
• Enables awareness of one's surroundings (e.g., not staring down at a phone)
• Creates an ergonomic, pleasant environment for productivity (e.g., not hunched over a small screen)

The solution? Lightweight wearable technology that gracefully blends computing power, practicality, safety, and communication technology to enable people to perform a significant portion of the work they would do at a desk while on the move, enabling them to work while on the previously aforementioned treadmill or on a walk outside.

There is a select set of companies that are best positioned to bring this technology to market. Before diving into those key players in the space, the technological progress they have already made, and the obstacles they need to overcome, here is a high-level overview of the technology that will need to be involved:

AR, VR, and MR Devices

While VR and MR headsets have several practical applications in the workplace, such as simulating critical training operations across industries (e.g., military, medical), their weight, clunkiness, and obvious safety concerns/inability to be used outside of a confined space make them ill-suited to serve as a practical replacement for working at a desk. They are well-designed to complement working at a desk, with the ability to import what's on a computer screen into a multi-window display within a VR space, but this does nothing to fix the problem of being sedentary: it simply recreates a computer and monitors in a virtual setting.

When it comes to the primary computing platform required to truly offload the work at a desk to work on the move, AR glasses are the clear winner. AR glasses already exist - some in prototype form and others already available for purchase - that are anywhere from 2-5x lighter than their VR & MR counterparts. With a comparable experience to wearing a large pair of sunglasses, AR glasses offer a more realistic option to wear for extended periods of time without discomfort or in public.

One of the biggest challenges AR glasses face is the lack of computing power they can hold without sacrificing weight and size. Some companies are finding creative ways to address this, often involving an additional lightweight accessory that offloads significant computing power, but balancing how much computing power it can perform without overheating or suffering from poor battery life will be a key obstacle to address.

Voice and Gesture Technology

In order to reduce dependence on sitting at a desk to perform work-related duties, voice and gesture technology will need to rival the speed and efficiency of keyboard and mouse technology for certain tasks, such as navigation. Voice-first browsers and operating systems are the name of the game, introducing the ability to replace the need to sift through dozens of open windows and tabs on a computer screen (and further straining your eyes and neck from squinting and hunching over to find them) with actions like "pull up the article I bookmarked last week" or "pull up Microsoft Excel on the left and Chrome on the right" to more efficiently access important apps and information to get work done.

Meanwhile, gestures, such as flicks of the wrist and finger pinches, complement voice technology for seamless information access. Applying this functionality to AR glasses, with their ability to display a more ergonomic field of view than the limited screen space of computers and monitors, is particularly tantalizing.

While existing devices exhibit sophisticated levels of voice and gesture technology, there is still significant work to be done to improve the accuracy of voice recognition (just ask Siri), the overall functionality of voice recognition to do more than basic navigation, and the precision and ease of using gestures to access information.

Personalized, Agentic AI Technology

Of the three areas of technology mentioned so far, AI is by far the furthest along. Unlike AR technology, AI is already ubiquitous. Whether through platforms like ChatGPT or Anthropic, coding agents such as Replit or Cursor, or baked-in functionality into existing applications like Google Drive and Notion, AI is heavily leveraged for desk-based work.

In a perfect world, integrating this type of functionality directly into AR glasses would be a great opportunity to eat into work that currently needs to be done at a desk, where people could perform voice-activated AI tasks on the go (e.g., prompting an agent to produce code, using ChatGPT and Excel to build the skeleton of a financial model, etc.).

However, practically speaking, this is quite difficult to accomplish without offloading app logic to an external computing device, whether a phone or separate custom-built device. Going back to the challenge of handling significant computing power with AR glasses, AI workloads are compute-intensive, require heavy real-time processing on machines with multicore CPUs and significant RAM, and need low latency to a smooth user experience. Even with computing power being offloaded to a portable external device, that device could then run into significant limitations with in-depth AI-powered tasks and 3D mapping, including overheating, reduced battery life, and higher latency, particularly if it leverages cloud processing.

Connectivity and Battery Life

As the last paragraph alluded to, connectivity and battery life are also important considerations. AR glasses and any accompanying external devices need to run apps just as effectively without WiFi, and need to last long enough without needing to be plugged in to perform a sizeable amount of work while on the go.

Light Sensitivity

The glasses need to adapt to whether one is inside or outside and ensure that visibility is not impaired to prevent injury (e.g., a person walking into another person or an object they can't see outside).

Style

The reality of any wearable technology is that people will need to feel comfortable enough with how they look in it to go outside. While existing AR glasses have done a remarkable job of skinnying down in size, they are far from inconspicuous, as it's quite obvious that they are not a normal pair of glasses. Some people are fine with this, but there is a large cohort of the population that would not set foot outside until they are more like Ray-Ban Meta Glasses (which are AI, not AR, glasses).

This is part 3 of our series on the future of ergonomic work. Read part 2 to understand the health crisis we're addressing, or start with part 1 to see the full vision. Read on to explore the key players in part 4, where we analyze the major companies leading the AR glasses revolution.