Overview
VR Conference Room is a German startup, aiming to enable international businesses with distributed offices to organize remote immersive meetings using VR technology.
Our goal was to make research & development and implement various simple and complex mechanics for remote collaboration in VR, in order to test them on the target audience. Due to such a goal, our team was hired only to perform research and development of those mechanics, and all the demo art was provided by the client.
Challenges
The feature of drawing on the board with chalks required custom server-side and backend development, in order to provide persistence. In the case of internet problems or if everyone exits the room – the contents of the board needed to be stored. That’s why we implemented the logic which allowed us to constantly save the board contents without increasing network traffic.
The feature of desktop sharing was a challenge. Unity has no ready solution. So we made a research on best approaches to the problem and implemented the low-level C++ plugin for Unity for optimized desktop sharing using low-level Windows APIs.
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Solutions
- Users could create their accounts using the web interface.
- After that, they could log in to their account in the VR application.
- In VR application users could create meeting rooms and invite others into those rooms. One user could be added to multiple rooms.
- Inside the rooms, users were presented as 3D avatars. Each of the users could teleport or move, move his hands or head, and other users could see all the movements.
- Users could take objects in the room, pass objects to each other, and interact this way, play games, etc.
- Users could draw on the board with chalk.
- When all the users left the room – the room state persisted so that no information on the board or anywhere else could be lost.
- Users could collaborate on creating diagrams by taking 3D objects, placing them on the table, and connecting them with lines, arrows, etc.
- Users could see their PC screens in VR and interact with their own computers without taking off their headsets.
- Users could share their PC screen to others in the chat room. This way they could show others presentations in PowerPoint, or work with documents together, etc.
- A special separate room was created to show a separate case on making presentations where not only slides change but also 3D models in the virtual environment.
