So as we reflect on another year of historic transformation impacting how we live, work and communicate as a result of the pandemic. It's time to now consider what 2022 might have in store for us....

Its safe to say that remote working is clearly here to stay, as we've used technology to keep our businesses moving and now proved long term, that we can make far better use of previous commuting hours. Be it to enjoy more quality work life balances, or to be far more efficient in our roles.

We've also dipped a toe into 'true' flexible working, learning that actually due to being able to work at anytime, that we can chose the hours we work and shift the 9-5 model...even if just a little. As a member of the 5am Club, i make great use of the early uninterrupted hours at the start of the day to get heaps done, but i don't always 'take' those hours back. Keeping a check on over working and burn-out will continue to be a board room priority in 2022, but i think we have to step up and take greater responsibility personally on this one as well. Top of my resolutions list is to take this time back by going for a walk in daylight, or heading to the gym in the afternoons. I also predict AI technology will help support this, with solutions like Microsoft Viva, acting as a digital reminder of not only our 'things to do', but also as a digital nudge when we need to take a break.

Furthermore, if we can work at any location, at anytime, why are we not using this opportunity to open up work to the army of talent that cant currently access the traditional working model due to their own circumstances, disabilities or childcare commitments? As the great resignation continues and is tipped to peak this month, I'd call out now that its time for change, real change and for a far greater Inclusion opportunity for all!

I'd say our transformation is far from complete, as we continue to play our evolving roles, in what will be a key discussion in future history lessons. Telling our children and grandchildren with an air of nostalgia that 'we used to work in an office... everyday' to a likely look of disbelief, or a simpler response of........ 'Why'

So let’s take a closer look at some of the evolving and emerging trends likely to impact the year ahead, in the Future Of Us

So what next..... in the Future of Us??

Our working environments

Staying on the remote working theme, we will obviously see continued focus on our working environments and our employers will strive to ensure, that not only we have the right equipment to do our jobs, but that we have great kit to do a great job. Devices and premium devices will be used as part of culture and talent retention strategies in many organisations this year, to ensure people feel valued and part of the cause. Working on an old laptop, with an uncomfortable, poor quality headset doesn't say we value and support you. Also, its not a difficult problem to address due to the growth of the Devices As A Service (DaaS) services, making shiny new kit far cheaper than attempting to sweat old purchases. Think car leasing, why would you pay for all of the car, when you might only drive it for 2 or 3 years, then have it replaced with a shiny new one. We've had the IT equipment model wrong for many years IMO. So for many organisations there is a great solution available, it’s just about getting around to it.

Office of the Future

We miss the office... fact! and 28% of people said they wouldn't work for an organisation that didn't have some sort of office space to accommodate them. As social creatures many of us crave company and personal interactions are vital, for not only our wellbeing but also hugely beneficial in many of our collaborations projects. Finding the heathy balance of remote and office working is an ongoing debate for many, with no quick fix, as working preference are still playing out and many building leases won’t necessarily track to our covid fuelled workplace transformation timescales.

So If our workforces are enjoying the benefits of hallway commutes and improved work life balances, but still want the ability to escape (i use this work purposely) their home offices to work a day or two with others... what should our property estate look like overall and how do we design the spaces within them?

We currently have desks, but are they needed, if people are now coming in not to work, but to socialize and collaborate? In brief, i predict we will see obvious continuation of site consolidations and growth of shared sites / desk to hire models. And if we think to our set locations, we will see remodeling of spaces to provide a large numbers of small rooms and or sound proof Pods, with advanced audio and video solutions built in, so we can join wider calls privately and quietly. We'll also build large collaboration spaces with multiple tech options. Some with multi screen options, floor to ceiling screens in time and advanced spatial audio solutions, but others with largely blank walls and ceiling projection technology, allowing for far greater use cases from whiteboarding and post it note style captures, all digitally meshed in a neat meeting summary, that you can revisit at any stage. I'll share more around the precise tech options in a future post, but will leave it on the problem statements we need to address. 'how do we make the un-present, virtually present' and 'how do we travel without moving'

Future of Applications.

While we gear up our own home offices and evolve the look and feel of our locations, we will also see continued and very progressive activity in the flexible working application space. We will see the leading tech providers strive to deliver ever more immersive solutions to access our new virtual and hybrid worlds and communicate and collaborate in new ways. Also, if we look to a more willing lockdown audience...our children, who had already naturally evolved how they communicate and socialize in on line environments. The Tech providers now have heaps of insight and research as a result and they know what works well and what doesn't. They’ve successfully captured the younger generations attention, as our children willingly spend hours in immersive games and virtual social environments. Now as our work lives follow suit of more online engagements, it make obvious sense that they would use their insights and learning to mirror the model to the workforce.

As a result, I predict a number of key evolutions and introductions in the year ahead, as below.

Email - less is more

You hear a ping…but which ping was it, chat, IM, text, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Messenger, App notifications or an Email,….how many ways can we be contacted? Far too many and something has to give. As our digital worlds focus on collaborations and shared spaces for document and collaborations, why are we still emailing things back and fourth multiple time.

Take a look at your inbox now, asking the questions. 1, could you clear it in a day? 2, what have you been included on that doesn’t really apply to you? 3, is reading and relying to the emails in your inbox a good use of your time today? Instead would a single chat and to-do list system like we have in MS Teams provide a more efficient option.

Email and our endless battle to clear our inboxes, which let’s be honest is a pointless endless game, for me email is the most inefficient time drainer in our days. I predicated last year that Microsoft would merge Outlook and Teams, again i might be too early on this one, but i'm sticking with this predication and hopefully it wont be long before they do it and greatly improve all our days.

Metaverse

We're hearing more and more about this and most would acknowledge its something to do with Facebook, who changed their name recently to Meta. Well it was a cute move and strong marketing play, but the Metaverse is actually a far bigger entity and the term itself dates back to 1992 when author Neal Stephenson mentioned the term in his SciFi novel Snow Crash. In brief, the Metaverse is a description of what will become the next evolution of the internet, sometimes known as Web3.0. If you think of the internet today as a mainly flat 2D experience where we enter a page alone via a screen, this will evolve in two ways.

The first part of the metaverse is the interaction with others. The best example of this in practice is in gaming. Our children immerse themselves in virtual world with friends locally, or across the world, in games such as Roblox and Fortnight. Here they play in multi dimeson environments. Spending their pocket money on outfits, or special moves of their game character, to impress their friends, or improve their game play ability. This societal shift has resulted in the gaming industry taking over both music and leisure industries, to be worth a staggering £128.3b in 2021. A pattern, trend and opportunity not lost on the big tech houses, as they plan our future of communication, interactions and our grown ups spending money.

The second part of the metaverse is immersion. Moving us from flat screens, to interact and collaborate in either 3D pop out (AR) Augmented Reality experiences, or fully immersive (VR) Virtual Reality environments, think the film Ready Player One. This will be the real progression for me, as we'll be able to join everything from virtual meeting rooms with your colleagues sat around you, to digital versions of our local high street shops, or big brands will invite you from the current flat screen page, into fully immersive digital showrooms, where avatar shop assistants will answer your questions in real time and allow you to virtually try on clothes or look around a car etc. A almost perfect bridge, or middle ground between online and physical....

Monetizing the Metaverse

So what does the Metaverse mean to businesses? Can we ignore this evolution and just tag along for the ride... in short No, ignoring the future of immersive presence will be a mistake for pretty much every customer serving organisation, regardless of industry. I predict that not having a metaverse presence will be likened to not having a web site in todays world. Don't get me wrong this wont happen overnight, web3.0 is still in day zero in my opinion and needs a collision of other tech, especially hardware and applications, to make it a day to day reality, but its not something i would bet against happening either way and now is the time to research, test and to understand the opportunity in more detail, rather than be rushing to hurriedly transform when the disintermediation is already upon us....

Staying with retail as the obvious use case for Metaverse. Imaging a virtual showroom, an exact replica of a store, where as you try on an outfit virtually and then have it automatically dispatched to your home the next day to try on in person. Or, children gaming from various locations across the county or even the global, finding a burger restaurant outlet within their game and choosing to order a burger, and then having their meals automatically delivered to each other homes at exactly the same time. With orders been fulfilled from their local restaurants. Or, us at work in a virtual meeting choosing our lunch in much the same way with synconised deliveries to our homes regardless of our locations.

Pretty much any store can be digitized and allow us to shop in far more immersive ways. Omni channel marketing will add Metaverse to its range of interaction options, but it will be some time before it becomes the default, if it ever does. Instead it will be a very progressive complimentary interaction option to any brand experience.

Other use cases for Metaverse technology will be in venue entertainment, where you can already join a concert in VR and position yourself anywhere in the venue to enjoy the experience in new ways. Also, AR technologies are in use in a number of venues across the world, where we can digitize a space such as a football field and use our phones to then play virtual games before, during and after a game, using the pitch as the gaming play zone.

Within our organisations, we'll digitize our sites and current office locations. We will all build customized digital meeting spaces, choosing everything from the layout and furniture, through to the desks and walled workspaces, where we can share and collaborate on ideas via digital whiteboards or 3D models of a project. Microsoft are tipped to combine virtual meeting rooms within their Teams solution very soon and i look forward joining a more immersive AR or VR session in the not too distant future.

Smart cities will replicate our high streets in virtual spaces and private investors and organisation's are already buying digital land and locations in Metaverse environments, in a bit to be front and center of our new Immersive Future

Another key aspect of the Metaverse will be NFT's..

NFT's Non Fungible Tokens

In brief A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain, which is a form of digital ledger. It can apply to anything from Art, Music, Photos, Video's or even Audio and provides a certificate of ownership or authenticity. So if for example an artist produces a piece of digital art, what's to stop everyone from just copying it, nothing right! But with blockchain technology, only one person can own the actual original. The same applies to real art, but it can be questionable as to its authenticity, without accompanying evidence. With blockchain there is no doubt or question, its one of one, or one of a predefined number of versions, again similar to real art, in that an artist may decide to sell a selected number of 'prints' of the original.

While the current tech headlines are talking of celebrities' paying millions for digital art, with questionable future valuations and some experts calling out a potential investment disaster on the horizon. NFT's will also have a far wider spread of uses, such as Outfits for our Avatars, which is very common in gaming today. And also we'll use it to prove membership to clubs and associations, or as a way to gift things away as digital freebies and marketing promotions.

Custom Avatars

If we think to joining a Team or Zoom call in our new virtual worlds, or joining a digital social event, or game. The question is how will we appear in a virtual 3D world? Well, again if we look to gaming, Avatars are the likely answer and we will build virtual representations of ourselves in multiple platforms initially using basic photo to 3D imaging, but will then likely progress to more advanced solutions and companies such as Ready Player Me will design you a custom avatar, outfit and accessories that eventually we will be able to use in any Virtual space we chose.

In the short term, we will likely have a range of Avatars for use across different platforms, all with a range of accessories allowing us to choose our look and outfits to suit the environment we are joining. Smart for work and casual for fun or social and the ownership and the purchase of these items made in crypo wallets using Ethereum, or new cryptos linked to the platform.

You can already buy a range of digital items for avatars from key brands such as Nike and Adidas who are early adaptors in the Metaverse space, linking their virtual stores into games such as Roblox. Early adoption and strong indicator of things to come. I predict we will see an accelerating wave of brands join the Metaverse in similar ways during 2022.

Over the last year we've built a number of virtual environments and NFT's to understand more around both the technologies, and also the use cases and opportunities ahead. I've talked to many CIO's and CTO's, over virtual Coffee meetings, discussing these topics in detail and looking at the potential use cases, opportunities and risks alike across a wide range of industries.

'Team Work Makes the Dream Work'

A big thanks to Kelvin Prescott and Tim D'ath for your insights and opinions in our Metaverse discussions, research and adventures of the last year, and Tim for creating some amazing interactive spaces and NFT's. Also a big thanks to my Son Evan Morse for your guidance and advice on all things Metaverse Gaming and Unity Coding....amazing to see a vision of the future through the eyes of a 14 year old.

Accessing the Future

Accessing the new internet and Metaverse will also see a refocus on AR and VR hardware. A market that has struggled to find its use case for many years might have now finally found its calling. A flurry of acquisitions across the industry suggesting far closer focus as the big tech providers race to give you easy access into their Metaverse platforms.

I predict all the main players will release either a VR (Virtual Reality) or AR (Augmented Reality) offering in the next few years. Apple - are tipped to be the first with suggestions of AR or VR headsets due out later this year. I personally think they will go AR and provide what i'm calling the 3rd field of vision. 1. Screen, 2, Watch 3, Glass. using Glass as another option to update you on notifications or experience enhancements in real time, without the need to look at your screen. The use cases in retail alone are incredible and the Future of Shopping will be heavily linked to AR Glass type solutions. Imagine walking around a supermarket and having offers of interest to you, appearing in your field of vision, or hovering above an item while you are looking at it. This type of solutions inked to shared big data engines could be game changing. This is my big bet for the future over all, but lets get the next wave of hardware out there firstly to get things moving.

I expect Microsoft to release a budget/consumer version of their HoloLens solution. The use case for this been mainly immersive 3D video calls, used in conjunction with your existing home office set up. You will simply place the HoloLens on and images and people will 'pop' off the screen in 3D video. I'd say the technology to do this is already there, making it affordable and end user friendly is the challenge.

Facebooks link up with Rayban felt like a test case for something bigger in my opinion and i think the AR advertising space will be a big push for Mr Zuckerberg as he loses ground with younger audiences on Facebook and Instagram. Also, the obvious rebranding and Quest VR solutions with the new name of Meta likely see a Quest 3 device land this year or early next year. I'm still a little concerned about the use case for mass adoption of VR, without far better games to attract younger audiences, and far better conferencing solutions for enterprise, but these may come in 2022 and with big investment and new focus we shouldn't rule it out just yet.

The big one for me will be Google and the re-release of AR Glass. Their acquisition of North in 2021 says they have a serious focus on AR technology and North for me are one of the best in class use case of AR. I'd say a race between Apple & Google is on the cards.

And finally lets not forget the long standing niche players in this space of HTC, Valve Index and Magic Leap who are the true experts in these fields and may refresh their own offerings, or team up with others such as Spatial to bring some interesting offering to play.

The Question is who will get there first and will they chose AR or VR as their lead and how will the growth of NFTs impact the direction. My money is on Google and Apple focusing and winning in AR overlay advertising and Microsoft dominating Video calling with a simple HoloLens solution aimed at immersive business calling.

Connectivity

As the above mentioned technology progresses, we will see a growing importance on connectivity. Its stated that websites or applications see a 20% drop in traffic for every half second of loading delay. Wow! aren't we and impatient bunch... yep ! and all this super new tech on the horizon has to work super quick. Businesses and organizations wont want to take a chance on public network providers for their services or experiences, instead they will want more control and certainty on both capacity and speeds. 5G Private Networks will become common place and i will no doubt hear a cry of Industry Analysts at this point shouting the case for WiFi-6, which i don't doubt has a solid place in the future of venue and location experiences, but my point here is that if the main manufactures make their technology work everywhere with public 5G as they do now, we the end users will resist or be frustrated by the handover to WiFi, we'll just want it to work. A coexistence of both would be a far better option, with pre agreed handover built in at the application level a much better and acceptable outcome.

SD WAN, SASE solutions and Fiber Broadband roll outs will play an ever more important role, as we evolve our sites and improve our home office connections. Having secure and flexible management of the connectivity across our sites will play a key role in the Future Of Work and will remain a key focus for IT leaders in 2022. Joining a call with a pixilated image or seeing a paused video, will become unacceptable and suggest a lack of digital focus, as our people are the shop front of our organizations in an ever more digital world. If we cant present our people consistently and with some quality of service, it will send the wrong message to our customers. Also, with the growth of Metaverse social solutions, coupled with a house full of 'other' users, all wrestling for bandwidth across gaming and streaming services, the need for super fast connectivity will be critical in the Future of Us.

Future of Us Fund

Its easy to offer predications at the start of the year, on what 'might' happen, after all, who's going to hold me to them, who's even going to remember them a year from now.....

Well to make this slightly more interesting this year, I've formed a fund of companies, stock and currency, that i feel will directly profit, or capitalize on some of these predictions. I've put my money where my mouth is, kicking off with a £10k investment into the fund and i will post up its performance and progress every quarter to see how its doing.

See link to details of the Future Of Us Fund here - https://www.futureofus.co.uk//post/future-of-us-fund-10k

I wish you all the very best for 2022 and would like to thank all my customers for their time and insights over the last year. I look forward to many more Innovation discussions over the year ahead and seeing where our collaborations will take us...... in the #FutureOfUs

Digitally Yours

Ant