Workspace augmented by remote team members representations

Inspiration

• People should be isolated from each other while coronavirus exists.
• Developers should continue working remotely after coronavirus disappears (as this increases business efficiency and programmer productivity).

What it does

It allows to remove both main reasons of why most people work at the office:

• the collaboration at the office is much more efficient because we can see each other
• a team leader wants to be sure everybody is working as expected.

How I built it

It has not built yet. It can be built using any toolset able to work with multimedia: images, video, voice.

Challenges I ran into

The most significant challenges are as follows:

• The virtual office should look like either our real ("former") office (photos, images, 3D model?) or some imagined one (agreed upon by members or set up by management).
• Environment around each remote team member should be erased from the virtual workspace.
• A person moving away from their physical computer should disappear from their virtual working place (1 meter or movement recognition?).
• Transmitting each member's voice to all other members.
• Everybody should be able to hear your calling them by name and see your face turning to them (it could be simplified by avatar flashing etc).
• Everybody should be able to continue usual face-to-face communication (video or just voice + avatar?).
• Everybody should be able to participate in all communication between all peers as if we are all in our single office room (optional in settings).
• To use cheap internet tariff plans the network load for a home Internet provider should be no greater than usual voice (not video) conferencing. Video should be used for short periods only (depending on a tariff plan).
• The only one web camera should be enough to capture all necessary movements.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I know that working remotely and using just several phone calls to my colleagues can be more efficient than working in an office.

What I learned

What's next for the project

For a prototype

• What is mandatory for a prototype is the ability to see the presence of each team member at their working place (without environment around them).
• To simplify the prototype (and to reduce the network load) we can use image or photo avatars for each team member (different for some of their positions).
• For the prototype we can use voice communication over a phone instead of VoIP.

Final product

• Final product should be a standalone GUI application located on the screen nearby a development environment, office tools or other applications.
• It should be controlled by voice, a mouse and a keyboard.
• The main window should display a virtual workplace along with all team members multimedia representations rendered at the corresponding working places.
• The sound from all team members should be heard right after the launch of the workspace.
• You can start communication with any, several or all team members. Just call them by name.

Built With

• multimedia
• webcam