Virtual reality collaboration platform Spatial Systems Inc. launched on the Oculus Quest Store today, bringing a suite of 3D augmented reality and virtual reality features that will make 3D remote work even easier than before.

The company also announced that it will take its app to new levels through integrations with services that include Slack, Google Docs and Figma. That last is a new whiteboard tool for note-taking, vastly improved text readability, embedded web pages, hand tracking, multiple video conference feeds and more. All of this is designed to support the best of both in-person and digital collaboration.

As more people work from home because of the global pandemic, people will begin to experience videoconference fatigue in 2020. That’s in part the result of social isolation – not being in an office with other people within earshot – and also the constant threat of interruption of interruptions of extra meetings scheduled to create the illusion of being in an office filled with people.

Work tools designed to enhance collaboration such as conference calls do not adequately produce environments that generate a sense of having other people in a room environment –at least not in a way that naturally creates a sense of other people being around, such as producing the sense of body language. That’s why Spatial is tackling these workplace problems as well as addressing issues of loneliness with virtual reality.

“We constantly look to our customers to hear how to make the experience more personal and expressive for them — we want to make it so intuitive that it barely feels like work at all,” said Anand Agarawala, co-founder and chief executive of Spatial. “Our power users spend several hours a day in Spatial, showing we are on a trajectory for holographic collaboration that not only replaces major meetings but transforms the way we work throughout the day, mirroring how we might interact with others in physical office.”

Now that Spatial is available in the Quest Store, users can bring cloud integrations into Slack, Google Drive and Figma via VR with automatic imports. That means automatic imports of Slack channels, Google Docs or Figma boards right into Spatial. No more manual uploads.

Thanks to Oculus compositor overlays, text is also incredibly crisp for screen shares and web pages, solving a problem common to many headsets with the “screen door effect” common to many displays.

It is now possible to share and capture ideas with the digital note-taking whiteboard tool and pull up and arrange live web pages for real-time editing. And this can be done without controllers but rather with expressive hand gestures, allowing users to interact purely with hands using a more intuitive interface. It’s possible to celebrate by clapping hands, high-fiving or fist-bumping a friend and watch particle effects pop up.

“I’ve been using Spatial for several months and have found it to be a great space to hold collaborative group meetings with my business partner, colleagues, and my clients,” said Get Real co-founder Rob Merrilees. “We use the platform for client introduction meetings to display PDFs, artifacts, screen sharing, as well as internal working and brainstorm sessions with Ed Haravon, my co-founder.” Merrilees also noted that being able to share more than one doc at a time is really helpful and conducive to productivity.”

In addition, Spatial has increased room sizes with a larger 20-plus person capacity with no loss in performance in the web app, in addition to 30 people in headsets for even larger collaboration.

The inaugural version of Spatial will be introduced as a Free version and a Pro version. The Pro version will include unlimited storage for collaborative rooms.

Spatial works across many VR- and AR-enabled devices, including the Oculus Quest, Nreal, Magic Leap, Microsoft HoloLens, as well as on personal computers and mobile devices via the web, and is continuously adding more hardware devices to the options to its supported list.

Image: Spatial