Forget about Zoom. Forget about Microsoft Teams. Forget about FaceTime, Facebook, Houseparty, and all the rest. Forget about them all. Soon there will only be one video conferencing app that will matter. The one that will make you feel like you’re not video conferencing at all but rather actually looking at someone face to face. That’s right. Thanks to The Square you won’t have to be lonely anymore while working from home. Instead, you can peer over at a co-worker if the mood strikes.
Essentially, The Square is a LCD screen that would go on the wall next to your desk and it would feature a shade that you can slide to open or close the screen. Close the shade and you’d see a blank screen. Open the shade and you’d actually see a co-worker or two starting back at you as if they were really sitting right across from you.
Fast Company explains:
“The Square is just an idea, rather than a real product, but it’s grounded in established technology. The frame hides four small cameras, which combine their images to create a 3D version of you rather than a flat Zoom frame. That allows for far more immersion than your standard screen. As you look at the screen, it tracks your gaze, shifting its perspective through the parallax effect.
What that all adds up to is a true sensation of presence. The Square presents people in 1:1 size, with a scene that has true depth. Done correctly, it would actually feel like a window, complete with eye contact.”
And if done correctly it could revolutionize the future of work. Already during the coronavirus pandemic a lot of people were able to successfully shift to working from home full-time. Telecommuting, having been proven viable, will likely continue at a much higher rate even after the crisis subsides. Some companies may even cut costs and get rid of their office space entirely.
The Square makes such decisions even more palatable as home offices can be turned into actual virtual work spaces, physical extensions of existing floor plans so to speak. Turning decisions, once born out of a necessity, into options that get willfully chosen for their simplicity and efficiency. It may not seem like it now, especially since The Square isn’t even a real product yet, but it’s likely that the future of work has arrived. Videoconferencing will never be the same again.
Is The Square the Greatest Idea Ever?
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