Is Work a Noun or a Verb — or a Space?

In the early days, “work” was always a noun i.e. a company or a place (of work). Over the past decade, there has been an international digital transformation movement led by Citrix and VMWare across enterprise organizations to automate operations and evolve the word “work” from a noun to a verb i.e. an action instead of a place meaning people can now work from anywhere.

Fast forward to 2020…

2020 was a transformational year — or catalyst — for wide-scale teleworking. Ready or not, the worldwide pandemic forced everyone to work from home literally overnight.

Offices were closed. Flights and events were canceled. Everyone scrambled to embrace work as a verb but only to find the industry’s remote collaboration and meeting tools to be insufficient for sustained teleworking.

Due to the lack of remote teleworking tools, Teams, Slack, Hangouts, and Discord became the defacto chat tools bombarding new users with an overwhelming number of chat channels and messages to read on top of their never-ending email box.

Zoom, Hangouts, and WebEx became the defacto video conferencing tools for global communications and collaboration. The problem with these video conferencing tools is that only one person can speak at a time. This format is great for speeches and presentations but not for sustained work collaboration.

Perhaps now is the time to transition the word “work” from a verb to a space — or a “work space”.

Meet GroupRoom, a spatially-aware video chat and collaboration platform for virtual work spaces! GroupRoom was developed from scratch in the middle of the 2020 USA quarantine to address sustained remote teleworking and collaboration needs by mimicking the way people work (and play) in real life (IRL).

Do you remember what life was like working in a physical office before the pandemic? Maybe not — it’s been a while :) People walked around the office to chat with people. They went to the water cooler for breaks and non-work related conversation — stress breaks. They went to conference rooms for meetings and they hung out in hallways chatting with people moving from space to space.

GroupRoom simulates this same behavior online by allowing many people to move around a space/room or an office floor plan to interact with others at the same time via spatially-aware video chat with proximity algorithms. GroupRoom creates a listening radius around your video avatar allowing you to engage with people near you. Add in collaboration tools such as Google Docs, YouTube videos, whiteboards, screen shares, and private video rooms, and you may start feeling normal (and productive) again.

GroupRoom allows people to move around the space and collaborate with others near them. For example, three people on one side of the room can have a group conversation with a whiteboard or google doc etc completely separate from a group of two people on the other side of the room.

Collaborate and socialize with up to 50 people per room. Connect multiple indoor and outdoor GroupRooms together overlaying an office floor plan and now you have a virtual office space that simulates “work” like it was in 2019. Leverage this same environment in an event setting and now you have a virtual venue for an actual expo or conference.

Switch out the background image and now you’re relaxing at the beach or a night club with friends and sipping pina coladas while listening to live musicians play ambient music in the space and visiting with friends.

It’s important to think about GroupRoom as a space rather than a traditional video conferencing tool.

If you need to “meet” with someone, you can do so by “huddling” next to them like in real life or by adding one of our Private Room embeds to the space for a more traditional, full-screen HD video conference.

Since many of your “meetings” are already scheduled in Zoom, Hangouts, Teams, and WebEx, GroupRoom has made it easy to jump from our work space to your scheduled Zoom call and back (more details on our Zoom Integration).

Reach out to us on Twitter or Facebook or drop us an email if you would like a demo of GroupRoom or discuss your event in more detail with us.