Virtual Collaboration Spaces are the remote equivalent to offices and meeting rooms. You join those collaboration spaces to let serendipitous moments happen, get the awareness who is “in the office” right now, and for deep collaborative work.
There are at least three different categories of virtual collaboration spaces:
Virtual Offices
This kind of virtual collaboration spaces tries to simulate office spaces where avatars can move around on a virtual office floor and video, and voice interactions are possible. Those interactions can be started by moving into dedicated meeting rooms (like in Remo) or just by being close to each other (like in Gather).
Other virtual office solutions are Sococco, Workabout Workplace, Wurkr, Pragli or the open source virtual office by our friends at TNG. All those virtual offices are accessed by a browser.
XR Collaboration Spaces
XR Collaboration Spaces create digital collaboration spaces in virtual or augmented reality. With VR headsets like Oculus Quest which is standalone and affordable or impressive AR solutions like the Microsoft Hololens 2 this technology might be close to a broader adoption. XR Collaboration Spaces like Glue, Immersed and Spatial provide amazing collaboration capabilities like digital whiteboards where everybody can draw with a virtual pen, digital 2D or 3D assets which can be displayed or a digital twin of your monitor output. Voice is always on with a spatial sound: As closer you get to the avatar the louder you can hear the voice.
Source: https://glue.work/
Metaverses
A Metaverse is a collective virtual shared space where people can meet, socialize and collaborate. It’s quite close to XR Collaboration Spaces but with a broader use case. Some say Metaverses are the future of social networks and the internet in general. Early Metaverses like Mozilla Hubs (Open Source) and Facebook Horizon (currently in beta) might be indicators for that. With Metaverses you can build your own XR Collaboration Spaces as well as rooms where employees can just hangout together and have some serendipities.
Voice Chatrooms
Voice Chatrooms are always open voice chats. Everybody joining has no barrier to communicate: just speak if you’ve something to say and the others will (hopefully) listen in realtime. This technique is often used in online gaming sessions but is also helpful during other collaborative activities like pair programming or writing a document together simultaneously. Voice Chatrooms can be realized with tools like Teamspeak, Discord (mind their weak privacy) or just always open Zoom rooms.
