Incredible Augmented Reality Demo Conjures Up Ghostly Versions of Your Coworkers

Remote work doesn't have to be lonely.

Ghost World

An augmented reality startup called Spatial popped out of stealth mode Wednesday with an incredible AR demo that shows how its service can populate an empty room with ghostly — yet bustling — versions of your coworkers.

"We think the future of work is going to be increasingly distributed," CEO Anand Agarawala told TechCrunch. "When you put on Spatial, [your coworkers] are in the room with you. It feels like they’re all sitting at the table, and they feel like they’ve been teleported into the space with you."

Augmented Reality Check

Spatial claims its "collective computing environment" will let remote workers share data with each other in seemingly physical space. All they have to do is don an AR headset, such as Microsoft's HoloLens. But that could prove to be Spatial's Achilles' heel — the current generation of AR headsets are uncomfortable to wear and have narrow fields of view.

Still, the demo is a powerful vision of what virtual work environments could look like in a post-Slack world — even if we need to wait for the hardware to catch up with the concept.

READ MORE: Spatial Debuts ‘Minority Report’-Inspired Augmented Reality Collaboration Tool [Variety]

More on augmented reality: Amazon Has Plans for Headset Free Augmented Reality to Transform Your Home