Who is physically and who is virtually there will make less difference in the cyborgic virtual workspaces of 2010. Don a tiny Borg-like monocular viewer and deal with your avatar attendees and physical presences at the same time. Fly at high speed through every department and cubicle in the organization and sail off into the abstract dataspaces that bind them all together. Like the first true cyborgs coming out of the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s, the power worker will exist in many places at once and see many views of the world, both real and highly abstract. Virtual workspaces will be expensive, so deep-pocket businesses will pay for their development.
Lets take a look at two high buck candidates for the virtual workspace.
Flying Avatars in the Boeing Superjumbo Plant of 2010 Engineering teams move ghostlike, unseen except through the engineer's monocle which show the virtual plant and its virtual visitors. He leads a group toward the trouble spot in the airframe of the giant 800 seater Boeing-Airbus superjumbo problem resolution team members teleport in from all over the aerospace world, visible to the worker in the plant as phototextured avatars sailing down the length of the plant in seconds. The problem holding up production of this billion dollar monster is resolved and the avatars disappear. The whole episode is stored 'holographically' so that managers can replay it standing in any position. The author did not have to fly to Seattle to attend this meeting. .