Does remote work actually work?

I AM OBSERVING WHAT MAY BE THE FUTURE of work in a San Francisco skyscraper, watching a transparent, legless man in a T-shirt hover above a leather couch.

The man is Jacob Loewenstein, head of business at Spatial, a software company that enables meetings via holograms. Though he is in New York City, a 3-D image of him appears a few feet in front of me in San Francisco, his face and slightly tousled hair a good likeness of the photo I later look up on LinkedIn. As I turn my head, which is decked in a clunky augmented-reality headset, I see that Loewenstein is holding a tablet, which he hands to me. When I try to grab it, though, I end up drawing pink lines through the air instead—I’ve accidentally enabled a drawing tool in the app instead of the one that should allow my pinched fingers to grasp an object. Other Spatial employees also wearing headsets in the San Francisco office are looking at a 3-D model of the surface of Mars. “When people teleport into a 3-D space, they can really feel that they’re in the same room as someone, and they’re sharing the space,” Jinha Lee, Spatial’s co-founder and chief product officer, tells me.

Of course, it’s obvious that the image of Loewenstein is an avatar; though he floats at my height, his body evaporates where his hips should be, and I can see through his torso to a plant against the wall in the San Francisco office. We bump fists when we are introduced, but I feel nothing when the images of our hands meet, and at one point, when I look away, it appears from the corner of my eye that Loewenstein is being swallowed by the model of Mars. When he gives a thumbs-up to someone on a video screen, his arm looks like two drumsticks awkwardly