Virtual office meeting and collaboration startup Teamflow today unveiled Teamflow 2.0 with a number of new features focused on providing users with a better experience for remote and hybrid work.

Teamflow provides a 2D “virtual office” where workers can join one another in an informal space to meet and collaborate. The virtual spaces can be furnished with chairs and tables and customized with different floor plans. In that space, the users appear as circular avatars with an image or a webcam video in it that they can move about using arrow keys.

Users can also hear each other using proximity audio, encouraging them to cluster together for conversations. Additionally, the space allows users to add documents, files and other collaborative features into the rooms that are editable by everyone and persist each time the room is visited.

“The surest way to describe what we’re up to is that we’re building the metaverse for work and we’re actually seeing that work is the right place to start building the metaverse because we see that this is the biggest pain point — especially with the increasing shift to remote,”  Florent Crivello, founder and chief executive of Teamflow told SiliconANGLE in an interview that took place in Teamflow 2.0.

To allow remote workers the feeling of feeling like they are still “in the office” without leaving their living room, Teamflow uses avatars that take advantage of the webcam. But the avatars are round and thus must focus on the face of the person. Teamflow 2.0, now with artificial intelligence, carefully zooms in on the face and cuts out the background.

Crivello explained this is better than simply blurring out the background because that way the person isn’t some tiny figure in the midst of a jumble and it keeps them and their facial expressions front and center while they speak.

The office space now has an improved design including better textures for walls and textures that will make divisions between rooms easier to see with elements such as grass, water, paths or sand. That also means outdoor spaces are possible and other rooms such as game rooms and full office floor plans are possible.

Fully private rooms with white-listed permissions are now also possible, allowing for confidentially where appropriate. Private rooms are like having a conference room in the real world that never has to be cleaned out as documents and other elements remain entirely persistent: Everything placed in the room remains until the team decides to close it down.

The addition of a shared browser element allows everyone on the team in range to co-browse together without leaving the app and see the same pages — just as if users were physically in the same room together. That said, in the end it would probably end up being used by one person at a time.

Finally, Teamflow 2.0 has expanded to become a cross-device experience, with a mobile app offering spatial mode and text chat. That means remote workers can jump into Teamflow meetings even away from their office or home computers. As a result, workers can still be part of meetings even if they’re on commutes, just hopped outside to get some fresh air or simply want to join in for some chit-chat around the virtual office water cooler.

Although Crivello said Teamflow is aimed at building the metaverse for work, he added that customers have also used it for other more social use cases, including some who have used it for tabletop “Dungeons & Dragons,” meetups, social events and friend gatherings.

“I think that it could be that people have been really missing that human connection,” said Crivello. “It’s not just at work but in all of these different settings.”

Image: Teamflow