Our Journey into Spatial
SPATIAL - The Next Level in Remote Meetings
Hello Nationites, we’re excited to say we were able to try a demo for the new social meeting space, SPATIAL, and it has some pretty spectacular features. Their goal? To replace Zoom as the go-to virtual space for meetings. And we’ve gotta say— it has a chance. Even if you don’t have a full VR headset, your are able to enter the space in AR using Hololens, or even in 2D in the form of a Zoom call, so no one is left out.
AVATAR: This is one of the best features. The biggest drawback I see for meetings in VR replacing Zoom meetings is that a lot of inter-personal information is lost when we can’t see the person’s face. All the complex emotional information we receive from seeing someone IRL, or even interacting with them in Zoom, is lost completely if you’re a bobblehead bouncing around a rudimentary space. Spatial doesn’t solve this problem, but it moves the needle significantly in the right direction.
The avatars are photo-real, and it’s very easy to set up. You stare at your computer screen from several different angles, and almost instantaneously a 3-D rendering of your face, head and torso are created.
Sure, there are some drawbacks. The emotion in the face can’t change, and there is no bottom half to the bodies, and perhaps most noticeably, we approach that ‘uncanny valley’ where the person can feel lifeless because their eyes don’t register as having ‘presence’ behind them.
Even with these drawbacks though, it’s the best I’ve seen in the virtual world for capturing the feeling of being present with other individuals.
THE SPACE: As explained by our host, the main meeting area is designed like a stylish lounge over top of a hilly, forested terrain, which, as it turns out, was inspired by the designer’s home in South Korea. It provides a perfect backdrop for social get togethers, as well as brainstorm sessions for your business. There is the translucent billboard wall on which one can hang Post-It notes, pictures imported from your laptop, or even videos from YouTube or anywhere else. It acts as a virtual vision board, where each item is easily manipulated to alter size with intuitive hand motions, or rearrange by grabbing and dragging to wherever you’d like in the space.
Another cool feature is that you are able to change your perspective on the space by opening a small almost mouse-like rectangular door at the base of the billboard. By grabbing this rectangle, you are able to fly around the space, and even levitate outside of the room to hover over the forest below. It’s quite something to be engaged in a meeting from a normal point of view, and then in a moment to be floating above the meeting space, looking down from a God view. It feels like Alice eating the mushroom in Wonderland. From a more practical point of view, if one is sitting in their pajamas in their living room, but would rather create the illusion of professionalism by standing in the space, you can use this feature to adjust your height just slightly to simulate standing.
ASSETS: Perhaps one of the most fun and impressive features is the ease with which one can import 3-D digital models to manipulate and inspect. The demo allows you to open a ‘Mars project’, and one has access to a 3-D model fo a Martian crater, the Martian globe, or the Martian rover. This feature feels like stepping into the future as you can enlarge the Martian crater to the size of the room itself, and have a closer look at the terrain. You could even place the rover in the crater, and maybe someday, would be even able to animate that rover to drive across the surface (though that feature would require an upgrade in memory capabilities). Another one of the demos shows a fully-fledged model of a Sprint store that can be used for training purposes before a new employee ever enters one in reality.
I decided to try my hand at importing my own 3-D models, and it was extremely easy and intuitive. There are databases full of thousands of 3-D models, some costing a small price, but many being free. I imported a dragon as my workspaces new pet and had no problem.
CONCLUSION: I was very impressed with Spatial, and after I was over the initial awe of its features that feel right out of Minority Report, I got to work and created a project, namely, the design of our own world, Simulation Nation. I imported photos for design ideas, used Post-It notes to title each possible design, and even imported 3-D models for potential pets that could inhabit our world. I invited our closest collaborators, and without having to leave our homes, were able to walk around the space, talk about the ideas, and collaborate to bring in new ideas. For a project that has members in Santa Monica, Vancouver, and even Moscow, it was a professional, intuitive, and entirely exciting way to work together on a project.
In the end, I’m not sure if it’s ready to fully replace something like Zoom for daily meetings due to the limited emotionality of the avatars and lack of AR and VR hardware mass adoption, but it is an ideal place to post a project and have remote team members collaborate together. I’m excited to have Simulation Nation come together using Spatial.
Check it out at https://app.spatial.io. It’s definitely worth a look!
Unplugging for now,
Graham
