Member-only story
Forget Skype, hang up on Hangouts. Beam your 3D avatar into AR space instead
Step into Spatial, a new 3D augmented-reality technology that promises to unleash remote collaboration from the screen and bring it into the room.
Imagine you’re in an office with colleagues, brainstorming about the next conference you’re hosting. “How about Vancouver?” you ask. Your voice activates, as if by magic, a transparent browser window on a wall, listing the results of a search on “Vancouver.”
“I don’t think so,” says your colleague from across the table. She calls up another search and more windows appear in the air, this time with information on London venues. She reaches out and picks one with a pinching motion, then flicks it down onto the table in front of you. Your 3D holographic avatars — because you’re working from different cities — look at each other and nod in agreement.
This is Spatial — a software platform that lets collaborators beam in from anywhere in the world to collaborate in a single 3D augmented reality space. Think Hangouts with all participants physically free to move around, while playing with the cool Minority Report gesture-based interface — except it, too, has escaped the 2D screen.
Created by TED Fellow and interface designer Jinha Lee and his colleague (and TED speaker) Anand Agarawala, Spatial runs on AR headsets to let users collaborate, search, brainstorm and share content in a virtual AR space. While the technology is now being piloted as an enterprise tool by the likes of Ford Motor Company, Lee reckons that the rest of us will be hanging out together in virtual 3D spaces within a few years. We asked him to tell us more.
What does Spatial do?
Spatial transforms any space you have into a 3D collaborative virtual workspace, allowing people who are to join from anywhere. Participants put on AR glasses like Microsoft HoloLens, then run Spatial to invite remote participants. Everyone is represented to each other in the AR space as a 3D avatar, and works together as if…
