Enhancing Collaboration with Virtual Reality
There has been a lot of buzz around Virtual Reality over the last few years. CES 2016 had an entire area dedicated to VR, with the likes of Oculus Rift, Samsung, HTC, Sony, and Vive Pre leading the way. Others non-VR companies such as Apple are quietly hiring VR experts, hinting of things to come. Make no mistake: VR is here to stay, and will only grow in adoption.
Data visualization, immersive storytelling, and multiparty gaming. Sounds like a great fit for in-room and remote collaboration.
VR can deliver incredible experiences that were previously impossible, primarily due to technological limitations. With the latest advancements in GPUs, displays, and sensors, VR is now both powerful and reasonably small. It is gradually becoming the pinnacle of human-computer interfaces — far outshining the good ol’ keyboard-mouse-display combo. For a basic and portable VR experience, even a simple smartphone can deliver reasonable VR experiences.
The applications are far reaching: Time Inc. recently announced LIFE VR, enabling users to experience immersive storytelling through 360 degree video; Steam, the leading game distribution, multiplayer gaming, and social platform has over 300 VR game titles; and Michael D. Thomas, Software Architect at SAS R&D, noted how VR can break free of the 1 kilobit/second of visual bandwidth limitation of traditional PC flat screens. He hypothesizes that VR can help us get closer to the estimated 8 megabits/second bandwidth limit of the human optic nerve, which could prove immensely valuable for visualizing big data for example.
Data visualization, immersive storytelling, and multiparty gaming…sounds like a great fit for in-room and remote collaboration. In fact, an article in WSJ recently touts the value of VR for collaboration. Is VR the future of collaboration?
In-Person Collaboration
Most of us view in-person meetings as the most comfortable way to collaborate. It not only offers the best hearing and visual experience, but also triggers our other senses that, albeit less important standalone, can help complete a collaboration experience. Without all 5 of our senses, collaboration begins to feel a little limited, and perhaps even artificial. Being able to feel the cold air, smell a cup of coffee, or even share some pastries with other people can help enhance human interaction — which in turn improves the output of the collaboration session.
Remote video collaboration can be a little more limiting, due to a plethora of reasons including the lack of direct eye contact and odd perspectives (up-the-nose perspective anyone?), and the completely inability to see a person on an audio-only call. These can be addressed through enterprise-grade immersive collaboration products like RealPresence Centro and RealPresence Immersive Studio. Being able to see a person’s expression eye-to-eye, read non-verbal cues, and hearing 3D spatial sound are crucial to help people share experiences and feel more connected during remote collaboration sessions. As noted in the “Manage Your Emotional Culture” article in the January-February 2016 issue of Harvard Business Review: “…emotional culture tends to be conveyed through nonverbal cues such as body language and facial expression.” All that said, even a non-immersive, basic video conferencing experience is better than an audio-only call, and the consumer market seems to agree: the latest consumer communication Apps such as Facetime, Skype, Periscope, and Facebook Live all leverage both our hearing and sight capabilities.
Collaboration Tools and Spaces
Collaboration is useful not only for a simple information exchange (informative). It can also help a group of people build a common perspective through deliberation (deliberative), or generate new content and ideas (generative). The purpose for collaborating should guide the selection of tools and workspaces. A whiteboard can help organize ideas, a PC can help with taking notes and action items, and a PowerPoint presentation can provide a visual reference to help better convey information. And according to Knoll, workspaces are primarily selected for their levels of privacy, proximity, and technology, which may vary based on the type of collaboration performed. These informational, deliberative, and generative collaboration sessions can all benefit from selecting the best tools and spaces to further enhance the outcome of collaboration.
Applicability of Virtual Reality for In-Person and Remote Collaboration
Now let’s get back to Virtual Reality. VR offers the ability to immerse a person into a completely virtual environment, or transport a person into a remote and real environment — possibly even at a different time. Time’s LIFE VR is an application of the latter, while VR gaming is an application of the former. Both types of VR experiences can pose significant challenges for both in-room and remote collaboration.
- Physical Headsets
It is un-natural to see someone with a big goggle on their head, and any attempt to have a normal collaboration session with someone in a VR headset is very difficult. The participant’s eyes are hidden and facial expressions are masked. Some might even deem an audio-only call to be more comfortable than talking to someone with a VR headset. Joining a remote collaboration session over VR poses the same challenge. Although participants can be “transported” and immersed into a different location, their remote counterparts will view them sporting a large VR headset — which is far from natural.
- Virtual Avatars
Virtual Avatars can help mitigate the VR headset problem by building out a full virtual environment, including virtual replicas of collaboration participants. These avatars become virtual representations of the physical user, and could theoretically project non-verbal cues including facial expressions. As noted in the Wall Street Journal article, today avatars are far from perfect replicas of participants, unable to properly replicate facial expressions for example. Avatars are still largely perceived as unnatural and artificial, preventing them from reaching mainstream adoption. Recently Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a few experiments with social virtual reality, such as the ability to chat with friends using avatars in an Oculus Rift headset. As Gizmodo writer William Turton noted, the demo was “…pretty odd and rough around the edges.” Avatars need to become more realistic before it can reach mainstream adoption.
- Use of collaboration tools
The use of a conventional laptop, whiteboard, and other tools are severely limited in a VR experience. Because one sees and hears a remote location through their VR headsets, the user loses the flexibility to see and control any tools in his/her local physical space. Collaboration with VR in a virtual world would require these tools to be virtualized, while collaboration with VR in the physical world would require significant workarounds — both of which are either not available or quite rudimentary today. - Comfort
There is still room for improvement as some users can experience dizziness, nausea, and other negative symptoms. And wearing a large VR headset over a long period of time can be very uncomfortable. Generally speaking, it still has proven to be a good and disruptive experience for very specific and short applications.
Immersive Augmented Reality: The Future of VR Tech for Collaboration
Because of the aforementioned challenges with VR in collaboration, the opportunity for applying VR technology does not lie in VR itself, but rather in Augmented Reality. AR can help augment in-room experience, and deliver more immersive remote collaboration experiences.
Immersive conferencing experiences are optimized for each type of workspaces (such as Polycom RealPresence Centro and Polycom RealPresence Immersive Studio). Everyone is collaborating in natural and comfortable experiences — no headset/headset/goggles — while still offering great eye contact, spatial audio, and ability to see non-verbal cues. Participants can continue to use their existing workflows and tools, and leverage the most comfortable and applicable workspaces. Relevant information can then be overlaid on top of video conferencing feeds, on center-of-room or wall displays, even hanging on one’s head à-la HoloLens or Google Glass. Audio streams can be mixed in for features like live translation for example.
Augmented reality bridges the gap in collaboration tools between in-person meetings and immersive conferencing experiences, all while maintaining a comfortable, familiar, and natural experience. The ability to see multiple types of content, interact with content/information, overlay intelligent data on audio and video streams, and whiteboard as if the remote participant was right next to you — AR can deliver these experiences for unprecedented levels of productivity and creativity in the workplace.
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