A couple weeks ago, Megan said, “It's Time for Accountants to Ditch Dual Monitors” which I read on one of my three screens. While I appreciated the GC wrath being directed at someone else for a change, the conversation missed the bigger picture. Fortunately @Dumpus called it:
My money is on augmented reality headsets in the future, though.
Good to see someone else thinking about the future of the profession.
I made a similar call on Twitter off the back of Microsoft shipping the developer kits for its Hololens technology. If you haven’t seen it yet, check the YouTube video, it’s insane!
I actually asked the question about gamification and augmented reality at last year’s Xerocon. Rod Drury, Xero's CEO, kind of laughed at me like a madman. It was a similar response to when I asked about big data analytics in 2014, which they confirmed last year they are releasing this year. Rod himself blogged about Augmented Reality in 2009. He ended with “Hmmm, how could we use this to walk through a set of financial statements?” Which tells me it has come up in conversation at the Xero office. This can only lead me to believe that we’re about three or four years from an AR release of Xero.
Either way, I am officially calling it. Augmented Reality is the next big wave in consumer/business technology. This wave will be as big as putting the Internet on an iPod that can make phone calls (remember that?). Google Glass was like the Netscape Navigator of AR. We needed it to encourage other companies to play in the field. Like all hardware it will go through an iterative process to make it smaller, cheaper, better. Microsoft might not win the long game.
One of my biggest challenges traveling for a month was that I didn't have my usual 3 screens. Augmented Reality fixes all of that and will eventually replace my TV, laptop and probably my smartphone. Then in 2025 we'll laugh about how we used to have monitors in the office.
