Collaboration Beyond the Flat Screen- Future of Work

On April 29th, 2021, I had an opportunity to speak about our experiences and vision in transforming the Future of Work. Thanks to MIT Industry Liaison Program and MIT Startup Exchange for inviting us to speak at this event. I have added my views on impact of new age tech as XR on remote work and remote training in coming future due to pandemic as COVID.

COVID upended work processes and work culture as we knew them. This pandemic has accelerated the urgency for digital transformation as business critical travel and face to face meetings have come ground to a halt. Tools like web conferencing are severely limited in filling the gaps in the remote work or remote trainings. Flat screen sharing cannot fundamentally replace physical interactions with the world around us. As we think about the future of workplace and education, how can enterprises restore in-person productivity and efficiency? And how can we do this in a sustainable way? 

At iQ3 we are building a new age cloud enabled collaboration and training platform to recreate essential experiential remote work, training and learning environment. The immersive connected collaborative workspaces increase the effectiveness of future of workplaces. iQ3 is easy for anyone to join and participate, and it has a light footprint making it frictionless for companies to deploy. Our technology, based on R&D done at MIT, is lowering the adoption barriers and costs to deploy immersive collaboration at scale. Let’s review some key examples used to overcome the workplace challenges we all continue to face today and in the foreseeable future.

In this first example we see cross functional teams from different global locations working together in iQ3 as if they are in the same physical room.

The image is deceptively simple, but this is an engineering accurate 1:1 scale digital twin of a production system with 1000s of components. Each orange band shows the position of a participant. Anyone in this digital remote workspace can independently move around, mark up issues, access and pull apart even the tiniest component in the digital model. Participants can collaborate synchronously or asynchronously if they are working at different times from multiple time zones. They are no longer bound by physical prototypes, time, and geographic barriers in getting the work done.

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COVID has also impacted training and education in physical classrooms. iQ3 is being used as a digital classroom for delivering instructor led product training as you can see here. Subject matter experts, trainers and students are able to curate training and learning experiences  in iQ3 without any programming knowledge. In addition to group training, iQ3 remote virtual workspaces are being embedded in corporate Learning Systems and MooC learning platforms like EdX for enterprise wide distribution. With iQ3 these organizations are less dependent on face to face training, even after travel restrictions are removed.

iQ3 remote virtual workspaces are also seamlessly usable for live remote support. In this example a technician at a remote site wearing a Microsoft Hololens can initiate an iQ3 meeting from Microsoft Teams and invite an expert to remotely assist  to solve a technical issue. From iQ3 they can participate in VR, AR or from their desktop.

One of our customers, AVL, is a global leader in automotive testing. Listen to how Joe Strelow, President of AVL Test Systems defines the future of remote work at AVL. From flat traditional meetings to what he calls live and continuous project collaboration.

Visit our website to learn more about iQ3, our customers, and use cases.

Before your teams step on an airplane, think again, think iQ3! Thank you.