The Glasses

In my previous piece, I wrote about working in the water. But I’ve been trying to escape the "desk" part of desk work for a long time.

For years, I’ve written pieces while sitting on park benches, on the toilet, or at a small table in a café. I've used various tools to do this. Sometimes I lug my laptop along, but usually just my phone, equipped with a spare battery. I sometimes use a pocket-sized foldable Bluetooth keyboard for this, though it requires a stable surface. It remains tricky to navigate on the mobile screen, which has to balance precariously against a small vase or a pepper mill.

The newest gadget designed to support flexible working is my XReal One Pro. It is an innovative augmented reality headset that, equipped with micro-OLED displays, projects a virtual screen right in front of your eyes. It looks as though a giant cinema screen is hanging in mid-air about seven meters away. You can choose whether that screen stays fixed in space—allowing you to turn your head left, right, up, and down to see the ordinary world—or whether the screen moves along with your head.

You connect the glasses to whatever you want using a USB cable. Laptop, phone, iPad, game console. Built into the arms are Bose speakers that deliver surprisingly good sound without anyone else around hearing a thing. Ideal for watching a movie all by yourself, on a plane or in a hotel room.

But I use this gadget most of all for working. Sometimes in combination with a phone and a foldable keyboard, but usually with the laptop. My favorite position is lying flat on my back. As I type this, I am stretched out on a sofa, head on the armrest, laptop on my belly, and the screen floating in the room somewhere diagonally above me. Wonderfully relaxing! I touch-type blindly on my keyboard. Should I need an unusual key combination, I simply tilt my head for a moment and look at what my fingers are doing.

Lying down is a nice change from working while sitting. Your arms and shoulders are more relaxed, and it’s also great for your back.

But working with the glasses is also great when sitting up, especially outdoors. The light from the OLEDs is strong enough that I can work even in full sunlight—something that is difficult with a regular laptop screen.

On terraces and in parks, I find working with the glasses a bit less enjoyable, because it isolates you from your surroundings. You can look around you, but you still spend most of the time staring straight ahead, not quite knowing what’s happening around you.

The ideal combination would of course be to use the glasses in my most favorite spot: in the Jacuzzi!

But for that, I first need to go look for that floating keyboard.