Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya hone their virtual reality strategies
The leading unified communications (UC) vendors are taking a hard look at the opportunities for virtual reality in the conference room or the boardroom.
For example, there are a number of enterprise-friendly virtual world platforms that are already or soon will be compatible with the Oculus Rift and other virtual reality devices. These are business-safe alternatives to Second Life – which itself has already come out with a beta version of an Oculus-compatible viewer.
The three biggest commercial players are ProtoSphere, AvayaLive Engage, and 3DICC’s Terf. On the open source front there’s OpenSim, a Second Life clone that can run behind a corporate firewall.
1. ProtoSphere, from ProtonMedia, is tightly integrated into Microsoft’s unified communications offerings and SharePoint, and claims about 10 percent of the Fortune 500 as customers. Most customers run it as a cloud-based service, but 20 percent use it as traditional software behind the corporate firewall.
The latter are primarily in the defense industry, says ProtonMedia CEO Ron Burns, including the US Defense Department, and companies such as Airbus, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing.
According to Burns, corporations are already seeing the value of virtual environments, especially for larger gatherings. “The average pragmatic buyer now sees the value of the avatar for a meeting with more than 20 people,” he says. “You can’t just see them in a video call.”
The company is already looking at Oculus Rift support, he added, and is experimenting with other interfaces as well.
“We developed a full-blown version of ProtoSphere for the iPad,” he says. “There’s a step before the Oculus, and that’s [a replacement for] the mouse. To me, that’s touch. It’s a much more intuitive way to interact with a 3D environment than clicking or using the arrow keys.”
The company has also been experimenting with the Kinect platform for gesture-based controls.
2. ProtoSphere’s top competitor is AvayaLive Engage, part of the Avaya unified communications platform.
AvayaLive Engage doesn’t currently have Oculus Rift support, says Paul McDonagh-Smith, the company’s learning practice leader. “That being said, we are very interested and follow with great interest what’s happening here,” he says.
3. The third major player is 3DICC, which makes the Terf platform. The company is partnered with Cisco, another giant in the unified communications space, and has close integration with its FlexSpace product.
“We’ll map working surfaces in a physical room like whiteboards, tables, and even tablets and devices, and map them into the virtual world,” says Shaun Kirby, Cisco’s director of innovation architecture. “No matter what physical room you’re in, you can have a team distributed and entering the virtual world remotely. It brings people together in an almost seamless feeling regardless of where they’re located on the planet. They really feel like they’re in the same room.”
In addition to bringing in shared documents, video streams and audio, the platform also allows users to bring in 3D models, such as car parts, or 3D video of actual physical objects.
“We’ve had a lot of automobile manufacturers come through and find it intriguing,” he says.
3DICC has just added support for the Oculus Rift.
“We don’t have any customers using it [the Oculus Rift] yet,” says Kirby. “But we do have an Internet of Everything showcase here in San Jose, and we have it here in the showcase. A lot of customers go through and use it — it’s getting a lot of interest from all of our Global 100 CXO customers.”
3DICC actually donated to the Oculus Rift Kickstarter campaign, owns several of the developer kit prototypes of the headset, and its software can be used with the device.
According to 3DICC founder and CEO Julie LeMoine, the company has more than 100,000 users, with government agencies, major universities and Fortune 10 companies among its customers. Adding Oculus Rift support required a bit of work on the Terf user interface, she says.
For example, most users of virtual environments prefer a third-person view, where the camera is just behind and above the avatar. This allows a user to have a wide field of view in a relatively small monitor. In addition, Terf has built-in functionality to automatically focus on and zoom in on in-world documents.
Supporting the Oculus Rift means that the user needs to be locked into a first-person view and linked directly to the user’s head motions – any other camera movement can trigger vertigo. In addition, menus need to be redesigned since a menu attached to the edge of the screen will always be just out of view in a virtual environment.
Both of these issues have been addressed, according to LeMoine.
OpenSim, the leading open source virtual environment platform, also has Oculus Rift support, via an open source viewer from Silicon Valley-based CtrlAtlStudio.
Korolov is a freelance writer. She can be reached at maria@tromblyinternational.com.
