Let's just get the weird part out of the way: I'm typing these words on an invisible computer. Well, kind of. There's a visible laptop open on the corner of my desk, but only so my (also not invisible) keyboard and mouse can plug into it. But the window containing these actual words I’m writing? That's just hovering in midair, directly in front of my face, equidistant between me and the now-dark, real monitor I usually use at work.

To be honest, though, right now I’m a little more interested in the other window hiding behind this one—the one with last night’s NBA highlights all cued up and ready to help me procrastinate. So I reach out with my hand, grab the work window by its top bar, move it out of the way, and commence watching Victor Oladipo bury the San Antonio Spurs. Even better? Since I’m the only one who can see these windows, my next-desk neighbor doesn’t know exactly what I’m doing. To her (hi, Lauren!), I’m just the idiot sitting there with a space-age visor on, making grabby motions in midair.

Meta

This is the vision of “spatial computing,” an infinite workspace made possible by augmented reality. And while my workspace at the moment isn’t quite infinite, it still stretches across a good part of my vision, courtesy of the Meta 2 headset I’m wearing. There’s a window with my email, and another one with Slack, just so I know when it’s time for me to jump in and start editing a different piece. The question is, is the idiot sitting there in his space-age visor able to get all his work done? That’s what I’ve spent the last week trying to figure out. Spoiler alert: he isn’t.

But the experiment also suggests a different, more important question: will the idiot in his visor be able to get all his work done in it someday? That’s the one that has a more hopeful answer.

If virtual reality’s promise was bringing you inside the frame—inside the game, or the movie, or social app, or whatever screen-based world we’ve always experienced at a remove—then AR’s is turning the whole damn world into the frame. The virtual objects you interact with are here now, in your real-life space, existing side-by-side with the non-virtual ones. While at the moment we’re mostly doing that through our phones, we’re on the cusp of a wave of AR headsets that will seek to turn those pocket AR experiences into more persistent ones.