Tag: YARTVRA

Taking a Second Look at Arthur

It’s been a little over a year since I first wrote about Arthur, one of the social VR products that I like to lump togather under the acronym YARTVRA, which stands for Yet Another Remote Teamwork Virtual Reality Application (and which I am still trying, and still failing rather spectacularly, to popularize). *sigh* Work with me, people!

The new rallying cry of the remote online workplace: YARTVRA!

Anyways, Arthur makes an appearance in a December 8th article by WIRED, titled VR meetings are weird, but they beat our current reality, by Lauren Goode, who writes:

The press briefing was one of a few ever to occur in VR*, a spokesperson for this new app claimed. It’s called Arthur, and part of the pitch is that it’s going to catapult VR for work into the mainstream, that meetings and collaboration sessions and deskside briefings will become… headset briefings.

The app launched on December 8, but it’s been in development for four years. The company behind it, also named Arthur, is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with employees scattered around the globe. It has secured seed funding from VC firm Draper Associates, and it lists the United Nations, Societé General, and a large automaker as its beta testers.

Taking a meeting in Arthur requires a literal suspension of reality. You exist only from the waist up (hey, just like Zoom!), and your shirtsleeves taper off to reveal blue computer arms, which move according to how you move the Oculus Quest controllers in your hands. Your digital eyes are obscured by Matrix-style glasses, and a headset microphone covers your virtual mouth. This is because the technology can’t yet mimic facial expressions in VR, and “it’s better than looking at dead eyes,” says Arthur founder Christoph Fleischmann. My avatar looked nothing like me except that it had dark brown hair.

Lauren was kind enough to share a picture of what her avatar in Arthur looks like:

Reporter Lauren Goode’s avatar in Arthur (image source: WIRED)

Holy Toledo! I’m sorry, but if you expect me and my coworkers to shell out for VR headsets in order to feel more immersive at our virtual business meetings, you’re going to have to do better than this. These are among the butt-ugliest avatars I have seen in any social VR platform or virtual world—and trust me, I have seen them all in the three years I have been writing this blog. (As a matter of fact, there are a few I wish I could unsee. Is there such a thing as YARTVRA PTSD?)

These avatars still look the same as they do when I wrote about them 13 months ago:

Frankly, Arthur’s avatars leave a lot to be desired. To avoid having to rig eye movements, the avatars all wear black sunglasses like Corey Hart (“I wear my sunglasses at night…”). To avoid having to rig the mouth, they all wear wraparound black microphones that cover the avatars’ mouths so closely, they look as if they are being gagged! And the avatars’ arms fade out to controllers instead of hands. The avatars look extremely off-putting, and it’s a definite strike against Arthur.

Now, to be fair, there have been a few developments since then. Arthur now supports the Oculus Quest 2 wireless headset according to the article (although a keyword search for “Arthur” pulls nothing up in the Oculus Store). The WIRED article says that Arthur launched on December 8th, 2020, but the Arthur website only talks about joining a waiting list for the product.

There’s the usual YARTVRA jabber on the Arthur website about enhanced productivity:

Virtual Real(i)ty

Arthur is a virtual office space that enables you and your team to meet, collaborate and manage your work. It empowers you to maximize your level of remote productivity and free yourself from geographic and physical constraints…

Arthur is intuitive to use and its functionalities aim at maximizing productivity for you and your team. Thanks to automated onboarding guides, it takes only very little time to be productive with Arthur – by which time you can enjoy a vast array of features, including:

• Presentations
• Whiteboards
• File Management
• 3D Objects

I particularly rolled my eyes at what appears to be an animated GIF in the bottom right hand corner of this image (although I cannot copy and paste it here to show you on the blog; you’ll have to go over to the Arthur website to view it). Resizing and rotating what look like 2003-era Second Life prims in social VR!!?! Oh yeah, businesses are really going to use that feature to get that vital point across to a potential sales client, aren’t they?

Sorry, it’s 4:00 a.m., I have insomnia, and I am feeling particularly cranky (Ryan, sweetheart, step away from the keyboard…).

But this looks absolutely dreadful, especially compared with much more fully-featured platforms, with far better-looking avatars. Avatars with eyes. Avatars with actual hands. Avatars whose mouths move. Platforms which actually already have working solutions, instead of their founder saying inane things like “the technology can’t yet mimic facial expressions in VR, and it’s better than looking at dead eyes“.

Sweet minty Jesus.

To name but one example, Sinespace’s corporate/conference/educational platform Breakroom can run circles around Arthur. For example, how about an avatar facial driver using nothing but your webcam?

You say that’s unfair because you can’t use a webcam in a VR headset? OK, then. Social VR platform NeosVR recently demonstrated full mouth tracking on their avatars. (And NeosVR can do everything you mention in Arthur’s feature list above, plus pile a whole bunch of envelope-pushing innovations on top of that.)

Give me some so-called “dead eyes” instead of these Men in Black sunglasses! Frankly, I’d rather have myself seen in Zoom, Cisco Webex, or Microsoft Teams with a severe case of “COVID-19 hair” and a ketchup stain on my shirt, than represent myself with these creepy-looking, budget-basement, cookie-cutter avatars.

Seriously? SERIOUSLY?!?? (image source: WIRED)

If you wish to learn more about Arthur, you can visit their website, or follow them on social media: Twitter or LinkedIn.

Arthur is already on my listing of social VR/virtual worlds, which I am still in the process of reorganizing and categorizing (it’s taking me a lot longer than I expected).

*raised eyebrow

UPDATED! A New Book and a New Website Attempt to Cover the Rapidly-Expanding VR/AR/XR Collaborative Marketplace

May I invite you to join the RyanSchultz.com Discord server, the world’s first cross-worlds discussion forum? Over 400 people from around the world, representing many different social VR platforms and virtual worlds, meet daily to chat, discuss, debate, and argue about the ever-evolving metaverse, and the companies building it. We’d love to have you join us!

(Yes, I know, I KNOW, I am officially on vacation from the blog…but I had another pernicious bout of insomnia, and I’ve been up since 2:00 a.m., sooo…)

I wanted to alert my readers to two new resources I have only just discovered in the past couple of days. Both are different approaches to attempt to organize information about what I like to collectively call YARTVRA: an acronym which I am still, dearly hoping against hope, will eventually catch on in this nascent industry, which stands for Yet Another Remote Teamwork Virtual Reality App. (You can see all my blogposts tagged YARTVRA, including this one, here.)

A Rallying Cry: YARTVRA!

First, Charlie Fink, who writes about virtual and augmented reality for Forbes, is publishing an electronic book called Remote Collaboration & Virtual Conferences: The Future of Work. It’s not out yet, but it will be released on June 16th, 2020 (you can pre-order it on Amazon). According to the description of the book on Amazon:

Join Professor Charlie Fink and his Chapman University VRAR340 “XR Landscape” students who, in the Spring of 2020, explored the ascendancy of the video call during the Coronavirus crisis. Ultimately, they reviewed 120 companies, exploring options for conferences, training, education, and remote team collaboration. They made a profile for each platform, creating a comprehensive directory for these online applications. The resulting book, Remote Collaboration, Virtual Conferences, The Future of Work, shows how new tools, including VR and AR, can solve the problem of being together when we have to stay apart.

Now, the problem with a book (even an electronic book) is that it only provides a snapshot of a rapidly-moving and evolving industry, and as such, it will very quickly become out of date.

A website is much easier to keep up-to-date, which is the idea behind a brand new website which I first learned about from the Educators in VR Facebook group, called XR Collaboration: A Global Resource Guide.

Image from the XR Collaboration Website

According to the website’s About page:

The Global Resource Guide to XR Collaboration is an interactive and comprehensive online tool that helps companies utilize XR collaboration and remote work tools for businesses.  The resource guide will serve as a central repository of detailed information about XR collaboration products and platforms and include an easy-to-use interactive tool for matching to specific business needs, a feature that will be available by the end of this month. All of this will be free to use and free to share.

A key feature of the XR Collaboration website is an interactive directory, where you can filter a listing of 64 YARTVRA platforms by:

  • the number of collaborators the platform supports (2 to 50+);
  • the VR/AR hardware brand names the platform supports;
  • the type of collaboration the platform supports (this is similar to my Venn diagram, Social VR Platforms Organized by Primary Purpose);
  • the operating systems the platform supports (e.g. Android, iOS, PC/Windows, Steam, WebXR, etc.);
  • the platform’s features (e.g. desktop sharing, avatars, etc.);
  • the industries the platform is intended to serve (which I think would overlap a bit with the type of collaboration, above).

Now, I must caution you that this is very much still a directory under construction! Clicking on any of the logos takes you to an undefined URL, at least so far. (UPDATE June 19th: Apparently, I was mistaken. This does work; I was just confused by the URLs that appeared at the bottom of my Chrome browser when I hovered over the links in this directory.)

Also, just a quick, cursory spot check of some of the websites for some of these XR collaboration companies pulls up a few errors (for example, Project Chimera by Pagoni VR is listed here as serving the arts and entertainment industry, when it really should be categorized under education). But it is still early days, and I assume these sorts of errors will be corrected as the directory is fleshed out. (By the way, there is a form for companies to fill out to request consideration for entry into this directory. I do see a number of platforms missing. And, if you’re going to include arts and entertainment platforms in this directory, you may as well throw Sansar on there…but I suspect that they want to focus more on the corporate market.)

Hmmm, I wonder if the team of VR/AR/AR experts behind this intriguing project needs a social-VR-obsessed librarian to help keep things organized? This would be a dream job for me, even if it were volunteer! I mean, this is essentially what I have already been doing informally on this blog for the past 2-3/4 years, even though my comprehensive list of social VR platforms and virtual worlds needs a serious reorganization and recategorization as it has grown to over 150 entries (hence my “Herding Cats” series of blogposts).

There’s also an introductory PDF guide to XR collaboration tools available if you provide your name, email address, and primary industry (all the better to create a mailing list, my dear! as the Big Bad Wolf used to say to Little Red Riding Hood).

Anyway, I think this website has the potential to be a very valuable resource, and I wanted to let people know about it (even if I am officially on a vacation from the blog!). If you want to follow the XR Collaboration project on social media, here are the links: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

O.K. now I am going to go back to bed and try to get some much-needed sleep…

Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay

Editorial: The Wall Street Journal Looks at Breakroom and Other Virtual Office Spaces as an Emerging Business Trend

Yesterday, in an article titled Miss Your Office? Some Companies Are Building Virtual Replicas, the American financial newspaper The Wall Street Journal took a look at a current trend: businesses setting up virtual office spaces for their employees who are working remotely because of the pandemic:

Stay-home orders and the shuttering of workplaces have given corporate employees some respite from getting dragged into time-wasting water-cooler conversations.

But some companies and their employees don’t want to leave everything about the office behind, it turns out, and are replicating their offices in “SimCity”-like simulations online.

And, among the companies that WSJ reporter Katie Deighton spoke to was Sine Wave Entertainment, the makers of Sinespace and Breakroom:

Sine Wave Entertainment Ltd. last month introduced Breakroom, a virtual-world product for remote workforces. It can accommodate all-hands meetings, secure one-on-ones and document sharing. Clients of the product include Virgin Group Ltd. and Torque Esports Corp.

Many customers initially assume they will recreate their offices, then realize they can make tweaks that would be impossible in the real world, said Sine Wave CEO Rohan Freeman.

“We spend our lives wishing we were working in open, sunny campuses with butterflies outside,” Mr. Freeman said. “Here you can realize that dream.”

Although clients can use Breakroom to create their office utopia, the platform also enables real-world elements such additional privileges for senior staff. In Sine Wave’s own virtual world, senior members can lock the boardroom, which is located on top of a hill overlooking the rest of the office.

A meeting in Breakroom (source: WSJ)

The Wall Street Journal article is a signal that corporate America—and indeed, businesses in countries around the world—are increasingly interested in virtual worlds. As the saying goes, “A rising tide lifts all boats“. I predict that Breakroom and a host of competing YARTVRA* firms are going to see a continuing boom in interest and inquires as the coronavirus pandemic drags on.

*YARTVRA is an acronym I coined that stands for Yet Another Remote Teamwork Virtual Reality App, which I am still hoping will catch on!

This blogpost is sponsored by Sinespace, and was written in my role as an embedded reporter for this virtual world (more details here). 

Version 2.1 of the Infographic: Social VR Platforms Organized by Primary Purpose(s)

Okay, more feedback, more thinking, more changes to my Venn diagram (as before, the following diagram is available to view and download in various sizes from Flickr, up to 1024 by 768 pixels, just click on it):

Social VR Platforms by Purpose (Version 2.1)

Summary of the changes this time around:

  • I decided that NeosVR, after all, was not primarily a business, conference, and remote workteams platform after all (sorry, guys!).
  • I have been told that Mozilla Hubs is used by some educational institutions, so I needed to move it.
  • I have seen art galleries in Sinespace, so I moved it over to join Sansar.
  • And finally, in response to a request/complaint, I have replaced the pesky copyright symbol with a Creative Commons-BY licence. Feel free to reuse and remix, just give me credit, please.

I am happy with Version 2.1…for now. I have also updated my original blogpost with this new infographic. (Check back tomorrow, when I will no doubt release Version 2.2, with yet more changes. Then again, maybe I’ll stop fiddling with it for a while.)