The Zoom of VR

This week Twitter informed their team they can work from home ‘forever’. And they're not the only company considering going full distributed.

Companies like Spatial have been preparing for this movement for years. Yesterday they launched a 3D video platform that feels a bit like a Zoom meeting just morphed into VR. You can hop on Spatial from a VR or AR headset, or with your computer or phone. You may be secretly wearing sweatpants, but your avatar doesn’t have to be. Just take a 2D selfie and create a lifelike avatar to send to work in your place. 🙌

“We've been really surprised by all the various use cases, probably in light of COVID-19 and en masse WFH. Initially we had demand from 40% of the Fortune 1000 including Manufacturing (Mattel), Healthcare (Pfizer), Finance (BNP Paribas), Automotive (Ford) and others,” says the maker Anand. “But now everyone is WFH we've had doctors to telemedicine visits to patients, a professor at the University of Arizona teaching a Afro-Futurism course, Weill Cornell planning COVID response, digital agencies collaborating and even just people doing virtual happy hours,” Anand says.

One of the biggest challenges with remote work is organic team collaboration. Here are some other remote tools that focus on upping camaraderie and creativity:

• Tandem is like a virtual hub for remote teams, with messaging and video chat baked in to a collaboration platform with integrations to Notion, Github and Trello

• Screen feels a bit like a multi-player video game mixed with a white-boarding session, you can visually create and brainstorm with your team in parallel screens

Back to the radial shift to WFH, we’ve already seen a lot of talk of people and HQ’s moving out of cities like SF. Google, Zillow and Facebook also recently announced their teams can work remotely until at least the end of the year. Lucky for us on the Product Hunt team, we haven't had to change our work environment. We started as a distributed company and now we're spanning across 9 countries.

We’ll be watching to see what products come from this movement next. 🤔

VR my office

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