One of VR’s biggest strengths is the ability to make those at a distance feel like they’re physically near each other. While this is great for visiting with friends remotely, there’s a number of VR companies betting that virtual reality office environments, remote collaboration, and working from home in VR are going to be the future of work. Here’s a look at a handful of VR apps built for remote collaboration.
Updated – August 31st, 2021
Team Collaboration, Presentation, & Virtual Offices
These apps are designed for professionals who need to collaborate, meet, discuss, present, and make collective decisions, as well as those who want to be able to use their PC for productivity in VR while connected with others.
“Connec2 is a virtual collaboration platform that allows you to have a lifelike social experience. Imagine a virtual extension of your workspace in which physical boundaries disappear. Teleport as your digital avatar to the virtual workspace to start collaborating together. It doesn’t matter where you are, Connec2 makes you feel present at any meeting.”
“Glue is a modern collaboration platform for teams who need remote meetings to be as great as face-to-face meetings. Glue brings remote teams together to learn, share, plane and create. Combining the best in immersive 3D graphics, virtual reality and cloud computing technology, Glue empowers teams everywhere to maximize their collaboration potential.”
“Immersed enables you and others to collaborate remotely by immersing you into the same VR workspace! Be in the same virtual room with up to 7 people! Multiscreen Sharing. Share as many screens as you’d like with others, no matter what computer you’re using. Remote Whiteboarding! Brainstorm ideas with others.”
“MeetinVR enables your company to have powerful meetings in interactive VR spaces. It enables activities which are impossible or very hard to do remotely such as to present and review products and 3D models, brainstorm, sketch, mind-map, prototype and have team-building activities. All of these while interacting in a natural and easy to learn way.”
“MeetingRoom has developed a platform which will transform how businesses collaborate. We offer a virtual meeting room with collaboration and presentation tools, manipulated by the participants; pointing, discussing, marking and deleting with up to 12 other team members using virtual reality headsets. Access from non-VR platforms is also available.”
“Step into your virtual reality office or classroom. rumii can be used across virtual reality headsets and desktops for collaboration, classes and meetings. Great for remote teams, education and digital nomads.”
“Spatial turns the space around you into a shared augmented workplace. Remote users can collaborate, search, brainstorm and share content as if they were in the same room.”
“vSpatial is a virtual reality workspace that connects users to their computer applications and coworkers in an amazing way that makes their jobs easier and more delightful. vSpatial leverages the magic of VR and makes it possible for all participants in a meeting to easily share multiple applications with each other all at the same time. This all happens simply and seamlessly, with the voice conversation moving to the next level with intuitive controls and crystal clear spatial audio. Collaboration has now become more efficient and effective saving our users time, money and frustration.”
“Horizon Workrooms (beta) is the VR space for teams to connect, collaborate and develop ideas, together. Meet teammates across the table, even if you’re across the world. Transform your home office into your new favorite meeting room—and your desk into a shared table where you can gather with your team. With the Oculus Quest 2 and Oculus Remote Desktop app, you can use your computer to collaborate side-by-side with your team in VR. Can’t make it in VR? Dial into a VR meeting through video call from your laptop or desktop computer.
Design, Creation, & Prototyping
These apps lean toward collaborative spatial design, sketching, prototyping, brainstorming, and review.
“Work together with your whole team in Sketchbox, and feel like you’re in the same room, even if you’re on different continents. Perfect for collaborative design sessions, presentations, and design reviews. Instantly start a VR meeting.”
“Softspace is a spatial thinking tool for creative individuals and teams. Build beautiful virtual project spaces where you can organize, develop, and communicate your best ideas.”
Visualization & Review
These apps are oriented toward collaborative visualization, review, and annotation of CAD designs, 3D models, big data, complex code, and more.
“Experience and collaborate in your 3D-model like you are there. We allow you to experience your 3D-design rather than viewing it on a flat 2D computer screen. Make better decisions, save time and Identify design challenges together with your colleagues or customers. Increase common understanding and facilitate for more creative discussions.”
“Communicate your vision with greater clarity and gain the trust of clients. Make decisions with speed and confidence by experiencing a true to scale space. Run QA/QC to catch costly coordination issues. Walk through your 3D files with colleagues in VR, no matter their location. Multiuser provides reliable voice chat and a shared virtual environment for presentations and design reviews.”
“PiXYZ Review allows you to easily import a wide range of CAD models from industry-leading solutions, easily handling large and complex assemblies. Interact with your CAD model using manipulation and visualization tools for a desktop use. Also, instantly switch to a powerful VR mode for an immersive and interactive experience with a VR headset. Finally, collaborate easily with your coworkers thanks to an easy-to-use Collaboration mode.”
“STAGE gives you real-time communication, immersive visualization and an awareness for atmosphere. Additionally, a meeting in STAGE saves costs compared to present-meetings.”
“VISIONxR is an immersive platform allowing multiple users, in multiple locations, on multiple devices (VR, AR, desktop and mobile) to collaborate, communicate and learn together. It removes the barrier of geography, reduces time and travel costs and speeds up the process of learning and collaboration. VISIONxR is a response to the changing world of work and learning where real-time collaboration and knowledge share empower and enhance performance.”
“Meet with others inside your secure, real-time VR environment. Interact with objects and each other. Engage your audience to the max. Review sessions, then revise, republish, and re-use your immersive experiences. Work on them with others in your organization in real-time, like with a Google Doc.”
“Discover the best place for building teams to present, collaborate, and review projects together from anywhere. Put your stakeholders inside your design remotely from any location. Effectively communicate spatial concepts through immersive design reviews to unlock better decisions and alignment.”
Education & Training
These VR collaboration tools are built with an eye toward remote education, training, lectures, and large presentations.
“Acadicus provides a flexible method for delivering a wide variety of VR training scenarios. Live VR sessions enable multiple instructors and/or students to be together in VR, interacting with assets while participating remotely.”
“Engage is an education and corporate training platform in virtual reality. It empowers educators and companies to host meetings, presentations, classes and events with people across the world. Using the platform, virtual reality training and experiences can be created in minutes. The tools are very easy to use and require no technical expertise. You can choose to host your virtual reality sessions live, or record and save them for others to experience later. A wide variety of effective and immersive virtual experiences can be created with an extensive library of virtual objects, effects and virtual locations available on the platform.”
“Providing learners with quality clinical experiences is a challenge. OMS virtual reality nursing scenarios allows nursing educators to deliver immersive, standardized simulation scenarios, feedback and blended learning in one easy to set-up intuitive platform. The OMS VR platform allows nursing students to access flexible, immersive, engaging scenarios whenever they need to, achieving first rate educational outcomes whilst saving organizations time, space and money. With libraries of scenarios for nursing students, registered nurses and nurse practitioners OMS support all groups of learners.”
“Create your own immersive experiences. Combine any content to make your own VR experience in a couple of minutes. Collaborate and learn together from anywhere, synchronously or on-demand.”
Social VR Platforms
Social VR platforms are made for connecting users for general and entertainment purposes like discussions, group events, activities, and more. While there are many more social VR apps out there, we focused here on those which might provide value to those looking for remote working solutions rather than gaming and entertainment.
“AltspaceVR is the premier place to attend live shows, meetups, cool classes, and more with friendly people from around the world. All thanks to the magic of Virtual Reality.
Easily start your own meetup, show or class and discover the next frontier of entertainment and community.”
“Use cases of Bigscreen include both entertainment and productivity. It’s used as a virtual living room to watch movies, play videogames, browse the web, and hangout with friends. It’s also used for productivity as a tool for remote teams to collaborate together in virtual offices.”
“Watch TV with friends—no matter where they are, or what device they’re using.”
Johnatan Blogins
NeosVR…
Devon Copley
Unlike every other tool mentioned above, our AVATOUR remote presence platform lets you visit a real place in real time, not a virtual location. It’s more like a teleporter than a videoconference, and it’s perfect for site visits, inspections, site-specific training, and more. Learn more about it at avatour.co, or check out this quick intro video.
Dave Arendash
I have seen it, and it is very good
SiberianBane
NeosVR is a crazy powerful program that is always getting better due to the team working on it! It should really be on this list!
Jon Brouchoud
Don’t forget about Acadicus! We’re VR training, multi-user, 3D spatial recordings of instructors, massive library of content. Ping me if you’d like a tour sometime! http://www.acadicus.com
In case you don’t have a headset (hard to imagine for us VR enthusiasts I know) – there are immersive 3D platforms tuned for the ‘flat screen’ – for example we’ve had a lot of success using our platform Aula for that ‘feeling of togetherness’ when working with colleagues at a distance http://www.vcomm.ch
You should add Neos… and currently we are also using VRChat with our VRrOOm platform to showcase artistic stuff. It is not only a social for trolling.
I’ve also heard good things on Somnium Space, but I’m not able to enter there
SOMNIUM SPACE is totally missing from this list. It’s more than just a business collaboration platform but also a social VR world. Worth highlighting in future lists.
Palomedes
Great article, you should check out Somnium Space and what they are doing over there, there world is already set up to host large amounts of people in one persistent world.
They already conference centres set up and already to go, I am blown away by the scale of this world.
Lola
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Ispira Craft
Somnium Space should certainly be included. It is a huge virtual world that you can explore in either VR and now 2D and interact and meet up. You can explore the huge world and enter a conference centre, leave and walk to another that starts the next hour! Freedom in the virtual world. If you are lucky to own a parcel of land, you can build what ever you desire and open it up to the public to come visit!! Amazing!
The added value of the land you purchased being on the blockchain and anything you create can also be tokenized in the near future, allowing an economy to develop! You couldn’t ask for anything more! https://somniumspace.com
Snakebite of Somnium Space VR
As a Community Manager of Somnium Space , I am amazed you have not got them listed !! This open and fully persistent world has various facilities for meetings , corporate events , an audio arena etc etc . Please contact them as we would love to be engaged in the above areas and more . We look forward to hearing from you guys . Cya in VR !!
Sir Bedevere the Wise
What put me off Somnium is that their website home page still says Oculus Go and Quest coming in 2020
marcdemar
Somnium Space belongs in this list as well. It is a unique, social, persistent VR environment that is ideal for business meetings, conferences, team building events and much more. Check the article on Somnium Times.
Pete Planet VR
Yep, Somnium Space would be perfect for this.
Ox
What a great article! I feel some of the best attributes were highlighted but I feel one great platform is missing…Somnium Space is light years ahead of most of the offerings on this list and moving fast. Definately worth a look.
Also, please check out https://LiveCoding.space project by https://Krestianstvo.org! This is a Collaborative Live Coding Space with support of creating user-defined domain specific languages and Web XR ready 3D graphics, backed up by pure decentralised client-side DB and P2P identities.
Gordon Cooper
vSpatial is great for virtual meetings and remote desktop connections in VR!
Andrew Jakobs
Thanx, that looks great, gonna try it out, hope it works with remote desktop..
David Street
is vSpatial related to Spatial? Spatial seems to be about same level as ZOOM VR.
VR meetings are definitely way better than prickly eyed, perfume infested, soul sucking real meetings
Russ Rive
Also check out SuperViz. A collaboration tool where you meet inside 360º images to discuss remote locations as if you were there together. Runs in a browser (Mac, PC, Smartphones, VR headsets). Great for Training, Education, Architecture, Construction, Real-Estate. You can get started with a free account.
Skayle
There’s also a company called Salt and Pepper Software out there. From what I can get from their website https://salt-and-pepper.software/de/was-wir-bieten/virtual-reality (German only :( ) they’re doing collaborative VR Training amongst other things with a focus on UX.
RP
I think you should make that 35 and add VRee, a Dutch company based in Eindhoven that created a very stable multiplayer VR platform for Unity (and I think soon Unreal). It works with any available VR hardware and has no latency. Had a demo last month at their Eindhoven office, very impressive. Never experienced a VR demo that work so smooth and allowed for multiple users using different kinds of hardware.
Erilis
can we have a functioning keyboard in VR first, and then we’ll look at this article again
Really useful!!! I am José L. Rodríguez, professor of maths at the University of Almería (Spain) and director of the project Neotrie VR for teaching and learning 3d geometry in virtual reality, as well as easy 3D design for 3D printing. The software is free to dowload, Have a look at http://www2.ual.es/neotrie
Harvey Danger
I wonder why Vircadia was left out of this list… As an open source descendent of HiFidelity, Vircadia is in the unique position of becoming THE Apache server for VR… In fact it is the only full feature VR platform that is completely under an Apache license…
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