Spatial (AR collaboration environment)

==to be updated: it appears this has been released—looking forward to trying==

Spatial is an unreleased (as of December 2019) environment for team collaboration in 3D space. It layers a shared 3D digital environment onto distributed team members’ physical environments, including 3D representations of remote team members. In short, it tries to make it feel like your remote colleague is in the same room with you, pointing at the same drawings on the wall.

They don’t make much of this in their video, but there’s no reason to limit this kind of collaboration to post-it notes and moodboards, like we might put on our office walls today. Essentially-dynamic objects (say, a 3D representation of an orbital plan) could occupy that shared physical environment.

It’s interesting to ponder various ways in which these types of collaborative “rooms” could be better than real ones. Persistence is one simple perk.

One feature they advertise is called “ThoughtFlow.” This is described vaguely, but the idea appears to be that you can ask the system to find imagery to illustrate your words as you speak, “visualizing your thoughts.”

At least in their marketing materials, it doesn’t look like they’re trying to solve the “shared whiteboard” subproblem. I’d really love to see that happen.

Anand Agarawala of BumpTop is a co-founder and the CEO.