In the last few months, we’ve seen loads of companies jump on the remote work bandwagon and produce VR apps that let you collaborate with others in VR. However, this latest one might be the strangest and most intriguing — Cloudhead Games, the studio behind VR rhythm game Pistol Whip, is producing a remote office application with VR support.
Cloudhoud detailed some parts of the application on its blog, saying that it sprung out of necessity with its own team — working remotely, Cloudhead found that traditional remote work tools, like video calls, didn’t work as an all-day solution.
As a result, Cloudhead Labs (a subdivision of Cloudhead Games focused on “experimental VR mechanics and concepts, in order to identify ideas worth pursuing”) developed CloudHEAD, an “all-day digital work environment which enables deep social cues, company culture, collaboration and play between you and your co-workers.”
CloudHEAD uses webcams to display your real face, live from the webcam, on top of an avatar body, as pictured above. That being said, the app also has VR support for “when it makes sense.” Cloudhead feels that VR still has major challenges as an ‘all-day’ work tool, both in terms of comfort and expressing the subtleties of human communication needed when collaborating with others.
Because of that, the tool will work in both flatscreen and VR modes at any time, which gives people the freedom to use VR without being restricted to it all day. When you do go into VR, however, colleagues will be able to see your live webcam, with your face partially covered by your VR headset, as shown on the far right of the main promotional image embedded at the top of the page.
The tool has been in development for 8 months, and is now ‘roughly in Alpha’. The team has plans to share its work with “trusted peers,” but more details will come in a later blog post. You can read more about CloudHEAD here.
