A Virtual Office Space: Status, Week 1
One week ago, I created this account on Medium and published the concept of "A Virtual Office Space". In this text, I would like to share with you what happened since then.
Social Media
The day after writing the concept, I created a Twitter account @AVirtualOffice to share the project, explore related aspects and most importantly connect to people interested in it.
In terms of sharing the project, I added a link to the current live demo to the bio and updated the header of the profile to represent the current development state.
Then, I explored quite a bit of interesting projects. Two stood out to me in particular: On the one hand one great graphical concept with a lowered polygon count and greatly smooth animations: Tweet. On the other hand the VR conferencing software Spatial, which seemed to do many things in the right way.
Conceptual
One aspect I came to think about was the theming of a virtual office world. Would it look like the actual world and in that sense try to be as realistic as possible? Or would it better be clearly distinguished in terms of look and feel?
A second aspect was that I had to create a Twitter profile picture, for which I ended up with this one:
My Girlfriend thereof coined the term "VO" for the project, which I quite like!
Development
To think about the UI of a virtual office space poses an interesting question: Is a virtual office 2D, 3D, AR or VR?
To me, AR and VR are still in infancy. A common workspace setup still consists of a laptop or even a desktop PC. For that reason, 2D and 3D appear to me as the more reasonable options. 2D seems to lead most often to in fact a map, on which users meet each other. Now, 3D seems to offer more potential. Both, in interaction and most importantly in terms of immersion!
For that reason, I aimed to create some sort of animation to illustrate my point. While researching a tool to do so, I discovered Babylon.js. What was really striking about it, was that the demos of Babylon.js worked instantly and smoothly on my phone. As well, they worked on my laptop. In fact, what I imagined having one fullscreen application on a Mac, to which one could easily swipe to, seemed extremely easy to achieve. Furthermore, being able to use the virtual office space directly from within the browser and not having to download a standalone software, appeared really promising. Even when comparing to other engines, Babylon.js stood strong, I chose it for the first iteration of development.
I built on top of the Hello-World-application of Babylon.js and created these versions:
Thank you for reading the summary of Week 1.
If you are new to the project, feel free to get yourself a personal impression: Check out the current status of development here: Live demo on Github.
As well, please feel free to follow me on Twitter for daily updates: @AVirtualOffice 💪
