I Accidentally Tony Starked My Productivity
- Rich Washburn
- Sep 28
- 3 min read
I didn’t mean to end up here. I wasn’t trying to be the guy floating in midair clicking invisible buttons like a Marvel character. But here I am, headset on, hands in the air, pulling windows around like a tech wizard, and all I can think is: Holy shit, I just accidentally Tony Starked my workflow.
I’m not exaggerating. I’m literally dictating this, right now, inside a VR headset. No laptop. No mic. No keyboard. Just me, my voice, and this ridiculous visor that decided it didn’t need me to hold a controller anymore because—oh hey—it can just track my hands now. So I’m snapping, pinching, clicking with gestures like I’m casting spells.
And it works. Smoothly. Like it was meant to.
This all started because of a client. Real estate guy. Big ideas, not super technical. Wanted to scan high-end properties using the Quest 3. His IT guy? Total disaster. More into gaming than actual IT… and apparently skimming money off the top, because he got himself arrested in the middle of this whole VR rollout.
So I show up to clean up the mess. Learn the gear. Train the team. Get the headset dialed in. At the end of it, the CEO hands me the headset and says, “You keep it. You’ll probably need it again.”
Didn’t think much of it. I set it aside. Thought of it like a novelty—something fun to screw around with for five minutes before moving on.
And now? Now it’s my main computer when I’m not home.
I started experimenting. Hotspotted the headset to my phone. Fired up a VPN, tunneled into my home network, remote desktoped into my Windows machine. Suddenly I’m inside my own desktop from a beach, a bus, wherever. Full access. Full control. And now that I’ve paired a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, I’ve basically got my entire workstation floating in front of me wherever I go.
The wildest part? I put the controller down and it didn’t care. The thing just started tracking my hands. It knew.
And that’s when it hit me: I’m living inside the prototype. This is what we imagined back when we saw the first Iron Man movie. The floating screens. The hand gestures. The untethered access to everything in your digital world. It’s not sci-fi anymore.
This isn’t about gaming. I don’t give a shit about games. The OS on this thing is still gamer-first, but it absolutely should have a “Pro Mode” for people like me. Strip out all the fluff and just give me my tools. Because under the surface? This thing is an absolute beast.
I can spin up my Mac or my Windows box. I can place multiple monitors in the air wherever I want them. Resize them. Snap them into view. Leave them floating to the side while I passively monitor something. Sit on a flight and have a private 60-inch display. Sit in a coffee shop and have my entire office with me—without anyone being able to see what I’m doing.
And this was never the plan. This was never supposed to happen. I didn’t go hunting for the next-gen remote workstation. I didn’t think VR had anything to do with real work. But then it showed up. And once I started using it… I couldn’t stop.
This feels like discovering the iPhone before anyone knew what an iPhone was. It’s raw. It’s early. It’s a little clunky. But it’s already changing the way I think about mobility, productivity, presence, and tools.
This is early-stage Tony Starkery. This is the demo reel of what’s coming. Smaller headsets. Better optics. Smoother pass-through. More seamless app integrations.
We're not far off from ditching laptops entirely. Hell, we’re not far off from ditching monitors.
This is just the beginning—and I accidentally walked into it.
And now? I’m not walking out.
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