I’m Ruth Cardello, the romance author who wrote In the Heir back in 2017. At the time, I thought I was just giving my billionaire hero a sexy, over-the-top tech toy. Turns out I may have accidentally drafted the blueprint for 2026.
Meet WorkChat: not Slack with emojis, not a messaging app. A full immersive spatial computing simulator room where users could:
Navigate 360-degree reconstructed environments
Sit in holographic chairs backed by real retractable haptic platforms
Replay archived meetings in volumetric detail
Rebuild spaces from photo archives via photogrammetry-like processing
Generate photorealistic holograms of people from image sets (think neural radiance fields synthesis)
Interact with an AI assistant that cloned voices, mimicked speech patterns, and handled guided generative synthesis
In 2017, that read like bold romance-world futurism. We were still mastering the art of "You're on mute."
Fast-forward to 2026, and my news feed is basically fan fiction of my own book:
In 2017's WorkChat fiction, my characters stepped into 360-degree immersive environments; today, that's spatial computing headsets like Vision Pro and Meta Orion prototypes, complete with shared spatial anchors.
They sat in holographic chairs backed by retractable platforms; now we have haptic feedback and mixed-reality passthrough blending the physical and digital worlds seamlessly.
Meetings were replayed in full detail; volumetric video capture plus AI-enhanced telepresence avatars make that real.
Spaces got reconstructed straight from photo archives; generative AI depth mapping and NeRF-style 3D scene reconstruction from single or multiple images handle it effortlessly.
Holograms of people came from image sets; photorealistic avatar generation powered by on-device generative models delivers lifelike personas.
And the AI assistant cloned voices while mimicking speech patterns; advanced voice cloning combined with large language model-guided speech synthesis brings that to life.
Excuse me. I wrote this already.
What hits hardest isn’t just the tech catching up. It’s the emotional core that feels more urgent now.
WorkChat wasn’t about productivity hacks. It was about memory reconstruction: revisiting the past, filling gaps in our fragmented digital lives, seeing people as they were. Today we’re drowning in photos and videos scattered across phones, clouds, old drives, that mystery SD card from 2012. I have tens of thousands: college days, my babies, vacations, book signings, that one ill-advised attempt at athletics.
I want WorkChat yesterday.
I want to step into a reconstructed 2004 campus via spatial scenes. Say “Show me our old kitchen,” and watch generative AI breathe depth and motion into flat photos. Isolate a laugh, merge timelines, replay a conversation with smoothed, ethically cloned audio.
Ask the AI to gently correct the fuzzy bits my brain romanticized.
Add a few familiar smells, and I'm sold!
Too much? My 2017 characters would laugh. “Just needs more processing power and better haptics.”
Writers chase “what if?” threads farther than the present allows. Sometimes the world sprints to catch up.
The dream remains unchanged:
Replace distance.
Reanimate memory.
Walk through the past with the people who mattered, without ever leaving the room.
So yes, I’m a tiny bit smug. The playful kind.
But mostly? Amazed. And impatient.
Until some brilliant team builds the real WorkChat (complete with volumetric rendering, shared spatial collaboration, and on-device AI synthesis), I’m still digging through hard drives for 2012.
If you’re a billionaire tech genius, spatial computing engineer, or anyone at Apple Reality, Meta Reality Labs, or a stealth startup coding the next holodeck… Call me. I have notes. Dreams. And way more ideas.
If you made it this far, I hope I left you smiling and inspired. I'm just a 57 year old romance author geeking out. Now, back to writing for me . . .
@elonmusk @PalmerLuckey @boztank 57-year-old
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