The offices of the future will be places employees go to occasionally to access technologies such as holodecks or visit remotely via robots, Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA has said.

Speaking at a talk at Zoom’s virtual conference Zootopia, in which he was interviewed by CEO Eric Yuan, Huang said that “the office is going to be very different in the future”,

“Right now we say work from home, because we expect to be working at work,” he said. “In the future, we will say go to the office. So today we say WFH; in the future it will be GTO.”

This shift in frequency, he said, would come with radical changes to the office environment, becoming not simply a space to do work, but somewhere with facilities and functions that are unmatchable in our homes.

“The office of the future should serve a function, and it should also lift the spirit. It should enable a type of experience or work that is not possible in your home office,” Huang explained.

“The office of the future will have a lot of robots, of course, and in the future, Zoom will allow me to enter into one of the robots, and as if I am the robot I’ll  able to navigate in the office.”

Future offices will have holodecks: NVIDIA CEO

He also predicted significant advances into videoconferencing capabilities that could only be fully accessed through technologies in the office, in particular holodecks similar to those found in Star Trek.

“The next generation Zoom will not be video conference only. It will be virtual presence, and holodecks will be the reason why we go to the office, so that we can be surrounded by all the people that we’re talking to, except they’re there virtually,” the NVIDIA CEO said.

“So the type of technologies we have to create for the future work environment are simply not possible here at home.”

Looking more near-term, Huang also echoed Yuan’s earlier predictions that the new normal would be hybrid working, rather than always in-office or always remote.

“The exciting thing about this unfortunate circumstance is it has accelerated the future,” he said.

“It has brought forward the urgency of a digital future, and it’s made us aware that physical is not sufficient, completely digital is not sufficient; that the future world is likely a mixed reality world and AI, robotics and virtual presence is going to be a big part of it.”

This article is republished from Verdict Lucy Ingham.