Mixed reality is the next wave in computing followed by mainframes, PCs, and smartphones.

Mixed reality is going mainstream for consumers and businesses. It liberates us from screen-bound experiences by offering instinctual interactions with data in our living spaces and with our friends. 

Hundreds of millions worldwide, online explorers have experienced mixed reality through their handheld devices. Mobile AR offers the most mainstream mixed reality solutions today on social media. 

People may not even realize that the AR filters they use on Instagram are mixed reality experiences. Windows Mixed Reality takes all these user experiences to the next level with stunning holographic representations of people, high fidelity holographic 3D models, and the real world around them.

Mixed reality is a blend of physical and digital worlds, unlocking natural and intuitive 3D human, computer, and environmental interactions.

This new reality is based on advancements in computer vision, graphical processing, display technologies, input systems, and cloud computing. 

With consumers becoming increasingly connected to businesses through digital technologies, the amount of consumer supply chain data available for analysis is surging. Organizations can use this data well to create more customer-centric supply chains that enable breakthrough products, services, and business models.

Additional signals also suggest a return to office will continue to clash with evolving work preferences.

• All age groups prefer more flexibility: The notion that younger people are more eager to get back to the office for networking and professional development is not holding up. Preference for remote working is consistent across age groups.
• No longer a matter of safety: In a growing list of countries, elevated work-from-home preferences are no longer being driven by more temporary safety concerns over COVID-19. In the United States, for example, remote-work preferences remain high among people who are concerned about the safety of returning to work as well as among those who aren’t.
• People are prioritizing work/life balance: The pandemic has created a collective moment of introspection. Many are reprioritizing different elements of their life, including work/life balance. Compared to 12 months ago, six in 10 globally feel that they are prioritizing more time to enjoy the present versus working harder to get ahead. That priority shift serves as a foundation for employee empowerment and ongoing work flexibility preferences.

Did you think about how remote work is influencing our spending?

Remote work is likely to stick around. This makes its potential impact on our spending behaviour all the more important. Using multivariate models to control for income, age, household composition, and more, we tested how spending behaviour changes as days spent working from the home increase. 

The summary reveals several statistically significant relationships.

• Food-buying preferences: As days spent working from home increase, the amount people plan to allocate toward monthly groceries rises—and they plan to spend less on restaurants. This is reminiscent of the pandemic’s early days. The work-from-home model continues to be bullish for grocery retailers and bearish for restaurants.
• Spending more on the home: People who work from home a lot also plan to spend significantly more on housing every month—this includes rent and mortgage, but also categories such as maintenance, utilities, and renovations.
• Lower demand for new clothes: While overall US apparel sales are quite strong,4 monthly spending intentions for clothing significantly drop as people spend more time working from home. After all, how many pajama pants can one need?
• Evolving transportation behavior: People who work from home a lot are less likely to use public transportation, which doesn’t come as a surprise. Yet remote workers also put the same daily miles on their vehicles as everyone else. And that trend contradicts what most might expect. Additionally, remote workers are less likely to be in the market for a vehicle. This could be tied to things such as reliability. People who depend on their vehicles to get to work likely want newer cars they can rely on. 
• Buying in-store or online is independent of where people work: The number of days people work from home has no correlation with their intentions to buy online or offline. That’s somewhat surprising. We thought that more days spent at home would accelerate all things digital, including online shopping. But it’s not showing up in the data.
• Remote workers are less likely to plan vacations: The industry narrative is that remote work flexibility will help drive travel demand. But that’s not showing up in our US data. However, some of our recent research suggests that workplace flexibility extends trip lengths by three days.

The Metaverse Workplace

In short, Microsoft’s workplace metaverse lives inside Teams, the company’s online collaboration platform. In particular, Mesh for Microsoft Teams. 

The company’s VP of Teams, Nicole Herskowitz, shared some insights about how the workplace is changing. Workers want flexibility. Personal relationships are harder to reproduce digitally but are critical to productivity and retention. And younger workers are having a hard time (surprising given that they’ve grown up with online technology). “More than 50% of Gen Z and millennials say that they’re likely to change jobs over the next year,” said Herskowitz.

She went on to say that “bringing the metaverse to the workplace is going to be a natural evolution, and employees really want to build those personal connections and to collaborate more effectively no matter where they’re working.” Data shows that people are open to using the metaverse at work.

Most augmented reality and virtual reality experiences available today represent a small subset of the larger mixed reality spectrum. Windows 10 is built with the entire spectrum in mind and allows the blending of digital representations of people, places, and things with the real world.

Microsoft Mesh App for HoloLens 2 enables a feeling of presence and shared experiences from anywhere. Interact as if you’re face-to-face – even when you’re not. You’ll see 3D content that’s persistent and can be collaborated on spatially. This mutual understanding ignites ideas, sparks creativity and forms powerful bonds.

Mesh enables people to connect with a holographic presence, share across space, and collaborate from anywhere in the world. By bringing Mesh-enabled mixed reality experiences to your organization, you can enhance virtual meetings, conduct virtual design sessions, help others remotely, and host immersive virtual meet-ups to boost productivity.

Mesh provides a natural collaboration experience in mixed reality, with 3D avatars representing people in a shared space. Proximity and spatial audio let people know where they are relative to one another. Users can visualize and annotate content together in a shared 3D space. A user can look at the person they’re talking to and point to features on a shared 3D object.

Successful businesses will be those with the agility to evolve

The world is eager to understand what pandemic-driven changes, especially behavioural changes, might become permanent. As the months’ pass, it’s growing more and more likely that a redefinition of the employer-employee relationship will be one of those lasting changes. We continue to watch this trend as well as the challenges and opportunities it presents to companies.

Changes of this magnitude, however, can’t happen in a vacuum. Research suggests this shift toward greater employee independence and agency brings the potential to cause a ripple effect across the consumer industry.

Successful businesses will likely be those with the agility to evolve with these shifting work preferences. These shifts in consumer behaviour can bring strategic opportunities to adjust product portfolio mixes and routes-to-market, tweak operating models, and take a fresh look at profit contributions.