The prime question for me, as it relates to real estate, is:
"Will the majority of Silicon Valley's economic activity ever move to virtual locations?"
I.e., will over half of the meetings at Facebook, Google, etc, ever happen in a game world, with participants logging in with HMDs?
It's hard to make a conclusive prediction, but I have an extremely difficult time justifying a "NO" with even 51/49 odds. I would put the odds at least at 10/1 "YES" but again that's pure speculation.
The only real justification for a strong "NO" is something like "It has been tried before with other telecom tech and it didn't work" but we don't even had access gaze tracking yet, which science shows is crucial for language. We seem assured to have a blistering release of body tracking tech over the next 10 years, and the claim "none of it will change teleconferencing materially" seems impossible to justify.
The counterclaim, "teleconferencing will hit feature parity with in-person meeting for 90% of corporate interactions within 10 years" to me is very easy to entertain.
And if the counterclaim is true, what does that mean for Bay Area real estate? I can't justify a million dollar mortgage if there's even a 50/50 change of this outcome.
HMD teleconferencing vs. meetings in conference rooms seems like a classic disruptive technology situation. Right now HMDs are unacceptably poor in comparison. But they have key advantages the incumbent tech (in-person meetings) can never match: no commute, exponentially more and cheaper housing options, muting, easier and better access to data and visualization in the meeting space, faster transition between workstation and meeting, can include people on other continents, infinite meeting spaces available at all times, etc.
This seems to me the biggest looming change to Bay Area culture, period. I am surprised it's not more discussed.
and a lot of it has to do with people's willingness to use those remote methods, and the culture at those companies. Right now there's a lot of young people working in tech that don't have much incentive to be remote. But, in the coming decades, some of them will want families of their own. At that point a desire to move out of the bay area may overcome their resistance to working remotely.
"Will the majority of Silicon Valley's economic activity ever move to virtual locations?"
I.e., will over half of the meetings at Facebook, Google, etc, ever happen in a game world, with participants logging in with HMDs?
It's hard to make a conclusive prediction, but I have an extremely difficult time justifying a "NO" with even 51/49 odds. I would put the odds at least at 10/1 "YES" but again that's pure speculation.
The only real justification for a strong "NO" is something like "It has been tried before with other telecom tech and it didn't work" but we don't even had access gaze tracking yet, which science shows is crucial for language. We seem assured to have a blistering release of body tracking tech over the next 10 years, and the claim "none of it will change teleconferencing materially" seems impossible to justify.
The counterclaim, "teleconferencing will hit feature parity with in-person meeting for 90% of corporate interactions within 10 years" to me is very easy to entertain.
And if the counterclaim is true, what does that mean for Bay Area real estate? I can't justify a million dollar mortgage if there's even a 50/50 change of this outcome.
HMD teleconferencing vs. meetings in conference rooms seems like a classic disruptive technology situation. Right now HMDs are unacceptably poor in comparison. But they have key advantages the incumbent tech (in-person meetings) can never match: no commute, exponentially more and cheaper housing options, muting, easier and better access to data and visualization in the meeting space, faster transition between workstation and meeting, can include people on other continents, infinite meeting spaces available at all times, etc.
This seems to me the biggest looming change to Bay Area culture, period. I am surprised it's not more discussed.