[Here’s a first-person report on a new virtual reality meeting app, along with some perspective on the potential of VR meetings during and after the pandemic. See the original version in Wired for three more images, and for more perspective see the Computerworld story “Cisco’s Webex vs. Arthur Digital and the future of collaboration and communication: Cisco looks to be moving toward video phones; Arthur is focusing on mixed reality. Somewhere in the mix is the future of communication.” –Matthew]
VR Meetings Are Weird, but They Beat Our Current Reality
A new VR app called Arthur allows you and your distant colleagues to collaborate within a 3D meeting space—as long as you all have headsets handy.
By Lauren Goode
December 8, 2020
The sun never sets in virtual reality. This occurred to me after an hour-long briefing in an Oculus Quest 2 headset. Joined by more than a dozen other floating avatars, we teleported our way around an “outdoor” meeting space that could only be described as aircraft-carrier-meets-Croatian-vacation.
Beyond the vast expanse of virtual breakout spaces was a stunning sunset, but the day never grew dark. When I pressed a button on the Touch Controller a tad too long, I ended up standing unnervingly close to another avatar, a fellow journalist. Then I remembered that you can’t catch the coronavirus from a digital simulacrum.
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 launches today, 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, Societe 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.
Still, meeting in VR felt like somewhere else, if not somewhere in the physical world. I was sitting in the same living room I’ve occupied for most of the year, but I was present with other people. I was aware that my headset’s physical microphone was on, that anything I said would be part of the conversation. It felt rude to step away and start making coffee in my kitchen.
When Fleischmann urged the group to take a seat ahead of a presentation in a virtual amphitheater (which appeared on demand, the fastest and cheapest construction project ever), we scattered awkwardly among the seats the way we might in real life. And after the presentation, during which Fleischmann touted the collaborative benefits of working in VR, we teleported to a roof-deck bar and used our hand controllers to pick up virtual cocktails. Everyone loosened up, despite these being unreal drinks. All the while, the sun remained stuck in its permanent position of almost set. It was surreal, but it beat our current reality.
Meet Me Here
Arthur wouldn’t be the first to try to carve out a space for itself in enterprise VR. Until recently, VR headsets—as well as mixed-reality headsets, like Microsoft’s HoloLens—were prohibitively expensive, costing over $1,000 per unit. Any company looking to make inroads in the industry had to at least consider selling to big businesses, the ones who could afford the nascent technology. That was the approach Spatial took, a buzzy New York-based startup that WIRED’s Julian Chokkattu covered earlier this year.
“We always say we’re like Zoom and Slack had an AR/VR baby,” Jacob Loewenstein, Spatial’s head of business, tells me over Zoom from his New York City apartment (the Zoom meeting was my request; I was on deadline and didn’t want to dither in VR). “And we really mean it. Because if we succeed it’s because we’ve made this thing just stupidly easy to use.”
Part of that ease of use comes from the fact that Spatial is cross-platform, running the web as well as AR and VR headsets like Oculus Quest. Your colleague could be experiencing the app in VR, using pop-out versions of Google Drive or Microsoft 365, but if you don’t happen to have a headset nearby, you can join via weblink on your laptop and still get some of the three-dimensional benefits. (Arthur is also testing a web client and plans to support AR in the future.)
Both Lowenstein and Anand Agarawala, Spatial’s chief executive and cofounder, say the pandemic has been good for business. The company made its $20-per-month Pro app free this spring and saw daily users jump by 130 percent. There have been more than half a million “meeting joins” in the Spatial app. Recently, the number of people joining Spatial meetings from VR headsets surpassed the number of web users.
Agarwala says Facebook’s release of the $299 Oculus Quest 2 this fall has helped drive business, too.