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Aptero : Project ID: 17

Project ID:17

Inspiration

The outbreak of the COVID-19 changed the HR and work organization. With a lot of work being done on the HR side, the top 3 top priorities for the HR concerned communication, remote work, and reporting. With that in mind, and as we already won multiple contests in Virtual Reality (including the Facebook Developer Circle Challenge ) we thought of the solution that could solve these three problems.

During this pandemic crisis, a lot of companies had to rapidly adapt to the new approach of working remotely. However, even with the support of several tools, we are all human and are still facing the lack of real contact with others team members.

This problem is still more visible for HR departments, as they are now more than ever focused on how to take care of employees and their satisfaction at work.
In this transition and seek of engagement, is when we created the solution of Virtual Reality Meetings. By combining the convenience of online meetings with the interactivity of face-to-face meetings, our solution provides virtual workspaces to be interviewed, trained… collaborate, create and feel truly together with colleagues. To sum up, a broad range of interactions throughout the whole cycle of the employee in organizations.

What it does

Thanks to the hackathon and the feedback of the mentors we’ve built a solution integrating the whole life cycle and journey of an employee inside our solution : from Attracting (Employee interviews/assessments and onboarding), Retain/Commit and Develop.

Our solution MVP is ready, can be tested, and multiple private and secure rooms have been made. For instance:

• The secure private interview room to interview the candidate and future employee
• The assessment center room to validate the candidate skills with specific and designed skill evaluation tests, all done in VR.
• A private and confidential room for the contract discussion room
• A collaborative room to onboard new employees
• A training room to develop and mentor employees so that the solution can be used during all of their career phases inside the company.
• On top of this, coffee rooms (for breaks with virtual coffee chat) and virtual team building rooms can also be easily made. Without forgetting the importance of social engagement and its impact, employees would enjoy and benefit from the experience of virtually meeting with other peers remotely located. User experience is one of our main drivers, and this is being translated in two directions:
• We’re making a difference to our users' experiences (HR department, employees) in their remote working, interactions they have at different projects, stages...
• but also from the perspective of how easy Virtuality Reality can be used

A question we’re often asked is, if we use a virtual reality solution, do every employee need a virtual reality headset? With our unique solution, the answer is no. We’ve developed our solution using the experimental and innovative *WebVR allowing you to join the VR meeting from any device and with a single link. * It’s also very secure as we can install our solutions on premise within the company’s servers.

With user experience first, this is bringing added value to your company’s current stage with the COVID-19.

How to use, the onboard?

Our solution focused on the user experience and its ease of use. There are two ways to use it:

• Our solution can be fully integrated in your existing platform. From your Application Tracking System for scheduling (EA: interviews/assessments…) to other platforms where to meet with managers, mentors, employees, ... everything can be integrated with one click.
• Our solution is also a standalone application available on any browser in one click. From any browser on any device (phone,computer or VR headset), you can collaborate virtually. The feeling of seeing and having the person in front of you ease communication and employee experience and is greatly different than traditional Zoom/GoToMeeting solutions.

The Features

With Aptero, you'll have access to powerful meetings in interactive VR spaces, enabling remotely to review products and 3D models, brainstorm, sketch, mind-map, prototype and have team-building activities.

The portable and easy to use oculus quest now allows anyone using Aptero to join a VR meeting from wherever you are, in the train, plane or just your office desk. We've built Aptero using a very experimental and new technology called WebVR. This technology is fairly new and most of the current virtual reality solution companies do not use it due to its experimental state. However WebVR, browser-based VR does bring a lot of advantages from many perspectives. It allows any devices to join the VR Application from any device on any browser.

WebVR is an experimental JavaScript application programming interface (API) that enables applications to interact with virtual reality devices. We used the WEBRtc library to manage the sound and direct connection in order to create optimal chat rooms. We then used Aframe for the front end, that connects to a nodeJS backend server managing and generating meeting rooms.

Challenges we ran into

With plenty of challenges in the last days, the main challenge in building this prototype was the audio. We’ve had lags/delay with the audio or sudden disconnection and we have tried many different patterns to keep the audio streams stable. We also redesigned, customised many entire 3D scene to make them user friendly. We believe connectivity and fluidity is very important for meetings.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the 3D environment we’ve developed through this hackathon. With many features done in the MVP, we’re developed the ability to create 30 virtual spheres allowing you to visit any place in a virtual sphere.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the RMTP and HLS protocols (live videos). We also learned how to optimize a 3D application for the web. We also learned a lot about the HR world. Thanks to Elena who joined us as an HR Professional, she participated and told us a lot about how the HR world works, what’s lacking and needed in today’s HR industry.

What are the necessary resources and plan to implement the product?

We’re looking to fund our project, get some early companies/HR Teams interested in trying our product and to scale our development and implement our solution. We're also looking for an experienced HR to join our team to help us provide the perfect HR solution all around the globe.

What's next for the product

The next technical big step for us is new features such as custom libraries and improving the reality of the avatars. Also, the next big step, business wise, is signing the new potential clients to beta test our solution within the HR industry.

Built With: Three.js, Aframe, React, Typescrypt, Erlang, Elixir, Phoenix, Oculus, Sketchup

Built With

• aframe
• digitalocean
• elixir
• erlang
• phoenix
• react
• three.js
• typescript