Spatial hands-on review: the most surprising XR meeting app
When Magic Leap announced its enterprise package with a rent of 4 Magic Leap One devices plus a subscription to Spatial for 45 days at $5000, I commented on Twitter with a sarcastic “Thank you, but no thank you”. As an unexpected consequence of that tweet, I got contacted by Spatial, and they kindly offered me to give a test to their platform, and of course, I accepted.
Spatial is one of the most interesting startups in the XR landscape. It is one of the many companies producing an XR remote collaboration solution, but one of the few that got lots of endorsements and investments. To be exact, it has got more than $22M of investments. I was quite skeptical to try it, and I expected a collaboration solution equal to all the other ones, with just more talent in raising money.
During the hands-on, instead, my jaw completely dropped. Spatial surprised me, and I really believe that it proposes a quite unique value in the XR collaboration landscape. I entered into Spatial in the same days that Half-Life: Alyx was launched, and I found it more innovative in its field than the game by Valve (I’m talking about innovation, not graphical quality, budget, etc…).
After the first meeting, I had a second one some days ago to review the features of the new version of Spatial that is launching today. I have to thank Jacob and Bri of the company for having taken the time to make me tour their app, so that now I can detail everything to you!
Spatial hands-on video review!
Are you a fan of my Youtube videos? Well, if it is the case, first of all I’m sorry for your bad taste (LOL), and then I’m happy to tell you that I’ve recorded all my hands-on session in Spatial, and commented some of its highlights in a detailed review video.
Even if you don’t like videos, I suggest you give it a quick look, so that you can see how Spatial actually works, and what are the functionalities it proposes. Some of the things I praise must be seen on a video or tested in person, and just from a picture and some words can’t be understood completely.
Spatial hands-on first impressions
That you have watched the above video or not, let me write down for you the main features of Spatial that I tried, underlining which are the most intriguing ones.
Remote meeting
Spatial is a meeting application, and as such, it includes all the main features that you may expect from such an experience: you can meet in a virtual space with people from all over the world that are represented through a virtual avatar, and with which you can talk and interact. Nothing special here: the virtual space where I met with Jacob from Spatial was just a simple room with a stair I couldn’t even climb. The subsequent environment where I also met Bri was a beautiful living room. The graphical quality of the environments has improved in the latest update, but it is nothing that you haven’t seen in other similar experiences.
Every room has a “special wall”, that is the one that all the team will use as a canvas, pinning there the photos, videos, and the other elements that people will use to brainstorm during the meeting. Anyway, this is just a suggestion, because actually, elements can be put everywhere in the space.
So, imagine a multi-presence environment for around 25-30 people max, with a main virtual wall where people can pin some multimedia assets and notes.
Cross-platform
Spatial works on almost all platforms available on the market. In this, it is beyond many of its competitors, that usually work just with some VR headsets and Windows PCs.
It is compatible with:
- Microsoft HoloLens
- Oculus Quest
- Magic Leap One
- PC VR headsets
- PC/Mac/smartphone/whatever through the web portal
I have tried the software with my Oculus Quest, while Jacob from Spatial, who guided me in the tour, was using the HoloLens 2. Spatial worked flawlessly in both cases, adapting its UX to the device it was running on: for instance, Jacob was able to use it by just using its hands, thanks to the powerful hands-tracking of the HoloLens 2.
The magic of the web portal
The web portal is what guarantees the biggest compatibility, letting you also using spatial from Mac and smartphone, something that is very difficult to do with other solutions. On the plain website, of course, you can’t have the immersivity of the other platforms, but you can still see the 3D meeting space together with the avatars of all the participants, plus you have the possibility of sharing your desktop, notes and other information like all the other people in the meeting.
Currently, if you join the web portal, you have a fixed (but rotating) point of view of the meeting space, but soon it is coming the possibility of moving your camera or even have an autozoom feature that frames always the important things that are happening in the meeting area. The portal is also synchronized with the VR participants, so if you join the meeting space both from a VR headset and the web, you will impersonate always the same avatar in the same space, and everything will be coherent.
Looking at the portal, you will see that the graphics are so much better than the other WebXR experiences out there. It looks like a desktop app… and the reason is that… it is. What you see in the WebXR experience is a web streaming of a native Spatial application. It is a cloud streaming solution, like Google Stadia, but for web meetings, and with a custom solution developed by Spatial in house! This is kinda impressive, and I couldn’t imagine it before they told me.
The streaming quality is very good, but you will notice compression artifacts depending on your connection speed. At home, where I have a mediocre internet connection, the compression is evident.
Anyway, I can only imagine the months and months of work needed to implement it. Kudos to Spatial for this.
Avatar creation
When you create your profile, you have the possibility to upload a picture of yours or to take a picture with your webcam. Spatial uses this single photo, together with some secret sauce of its to create a very beautiful 3D avatar completely customized on your appearance.
The resulting avatar is incredible, with a quasi-realistic face, and a well-shaped 3D body. While it is impressive and beautiful, I have to say that there is a big visible seam between the face and the rest of the body that should be fixed in future iterations of the software.
Anyway, I was impressed.
Smart brainstorming
Once you’re set up and ready to go, you create a room and join the other people of your organization. You can meet in the virtual space, and start discussing some topics while importing some material to do your brainstorming.
The features are the ones that I’ve already seen in many similar softwares:
- Importing 2D images from your device;
- Importing 3D models from the ones that you’ve uploaded to the Spatial cloud;
- Sketching in the air using a 3D pen;
- Importing of videos;
- Ability to write post-it notes;
- Ability to move all elements that are in the space;
- Ability to pin all elements in fixed locations, so other people can’t move them;
While the features don’t seem very impressive per-se, it is how they are implemented that makes them interesting. The UX is always smart and easy to be used whatever device you’re working on.
For instance, to import a 3D model, you see in front of you a 3D menu showing your personal models that you can scroll by swiping with your hands until you find the model that you’re looking for.
The post-it notes have a wonderful speech-to-text feature. You press the “Note” button in your personal menu, then you hit a little Mic button, and say a sentence. The system creates a colored post-it with what you’ve just said, that can be pinned to the wall and shared with the other users. The speech recognition worked quite well for me, even if I’m not a native English speaker. I’m not usually a fan of using my voice, but the system worked well, and it was a relief for me avoiding the use of a virtual keyboard, which is usually so cumbersome. The keyboard is still offered as a possibility, though, so you are not forced to use your voice.
You can take all the assets you add to the scene and scale and rotate them as you wish by just using your two hands. I needed no explanation to learn how to interact with them. You can put them everywhere, but of course, the system is made so that you are advised to put all the stuff on the wall that acts as a canvas so that you all together can stand in front of it and discuss about it together.
The 3D model interaction is, of course, suitable for companies that want remote teams to talk about prototyping and design. Jacob (from Spatial) imported in our room a full-fledged smartphone store, and we had a (fake) discussion about the items on the shelves. After that, Jacob zoomed out with his hands the model so much that it became a little diorama, and we could make some reasonings on its high-level layout. As I’m continuously underlying in this paragraph, what was impressive was not the fact that I could zoom in and out a 3D model, but the way it was so easy to import it, and interact with it, even without having made a single tutorial on the platform. The UX was very easy and intuitive.
Here the idea of the software is that you can put all the material concerning the meeting on the wall that acts as the canvas, with all the people staying in front of it adding elements and commenting with post-it notes to the items added by other ones. People that feel artistic can also take the 3D pen and sketch things to express their creativity.
And when the meeting is over, you can save on the cloud the whole environment for a future use, so that you can continue the meeting on another day.
Special features
Link invitations
One of my favorite social environments is Mozilla Hubs, and I love of it that you can share a link and make people join the meeting from it. This is the exact feature that made Zoom so popular.
Spatial has just added the same feature. By selecting a button on the wall, you can obtain a link to your current room, and then if you are in AR/VR (where copying the link is hard), you can e-mail this link to yourself, so that you can forward it to other people. These people will then be able to join you easily at first on the web portal and then in VR (in the web portal you can pair the experience with the headset you are wearing through a code). It is very handy and it shows you that Portal aims really at being the Zoom of AR/VR.
Desktop Sharing
In Spatial, you can also share your desktop, to make everyone in the room see what you have on your computer. This is the current way of showcasing files that the software can’t handle, like PPTXs (it can handle only PDFs for presentations, at the moment). The 3D streaming of the desktop, like all the other items, can be rotated, zoomed, and moved wherever you want. You can even put it on the big canvas together with all the other elements on the wall. The desktop sharing works quite well also from the web app, and this is fundamental to let people from Mac to perform presentations over Spatial as well.
A feature that is useful in the web app is the possibility of also sharing the webcam of the PC. You can make the people in the meeting see you as if you were using Zoom. Jacob used it to make me see his face, and to make me envy his HoloLens 2 device 😀
Virtual mirrors
There is also a mirror that lets you see your avatar like a real mirror. It was a bit blurry on the Quest, but it was quite cool to be seen.
Onboarding rooms
Entering such a new and powerful system may feel intimidating, that’s why Spatial has created a tutorial and some stock sample rooms that you can explore to learn what you can do with it and how you can do it.
Bing integration
If there was a feature that completely blew my mind has been the integration with Bing (that could also potentially become an integration with Google in the future). This is something incredibly useful that I’ve never seen implemented in any other app on the market.
It works this way: you hit the “Search” button in your menu, you say a topic you want the system to search about, and then the system provides you all the related items he found. Since I love fluffy pandas, I said the word “pandas”. The speech-to-text system got my request, and passed it to Bing. After a while, I saw a 3D widget appearing showing the results of the web request about pandas: there was one 3D model, and some images about the pandas.
After having touched it to expand it, the widget became bigger, showing all the search results of the pandas, taken to my world without any effort. There were Wikipedia articles, news, tons of images, and even 3D models. I could swipe to scroll through these items, and take every one of them, including texts, images, and all the rest, and put them on our brainstorming canvas.
What impressed me again was the perfect UX: I just said a world, and then I could access all the knowledge about a topic: texts, images, 3D models. Just by saying a world, all in VR. Usually other applications give you an embedded browser with which you can use Google, but no one lets you take the material directly from the search and put it in your room. When I saw Jacob do that for the first time, my mind was completely blown away.
Considering that Google searching is fundamental in all brainstormings, having such a feature is very handy. And since now search engines already look for 3D models (for future AR integrations), the system is already able to let you insert 3D items directly from the web. Awesome.
Price and availability
Today, May, 13th 2020, Spatial is launching its new version on the market. It will be free, with full features, for everyone. This is the way it is trying to help the world in this difficult moment of the pandemic, and this is great from theirs.
From this summer (around July), Spatial will differentiate again its offering in a free tier, a Pro and an enterprise version. With the free version, you’ll be able to join all the meetings created by others, but you will be limited to organize meetings of maximum 40 minutes and you can save up to 3 rooms.
The Pro version will remove these limitations and will let people enjoy the full features of spatial. It is thought for freelancers and little companies. The price is undisclosed, but I can tell you that it is affordable, and it is in line with most SaaS software you use online.
The Enterprise version gives you all that you have in the Pro, plus more security and integration with enterprise-focused services like Microsoft Teams. This is much more expensive than Pro and it costs like many other corporate SaaS software. In fact, it is devoted to big companies, that need many licenses (like 25-30+).
The three tiers guarantee that everyone will be able to find a Spatial license that fits his/her needs. If you may be interested in discovering more, contact Spatial Sales team or ask me for an introduction. I will be glad to help you.
Final impressions
I’m not a person that is easy to be surprised (you can have a look at my first impressions to Half-Life: Alyx to have a confirmation on this), but Spatial surprised me. It works on every platform, it offers most of the features needed for a good meeting, it has great avatars and especially it has a user experience designed to be incredibly easy and intuitive. And some features like the vocal web search in VR or the web portal are just little gems.
Of course, it has its glitches, and during the experience, I encountered some bugs here and there, but I can say without a doubt that is the most interesting paid XR meeting app I’ve tried until now.
I’m getting many requests about organizing VR events and meetings in these days (contact me if you need help in this sense), so I’m gaining a big experience on the field. And if some enterprise companies would look for a solution for meetings and brainstormings, as a consultant I would advise the use of Spatial for sure.
I hope you liked my hands-on with Spatial, and if it is the case, please subscribe to my newsletter not to miss any of the new articles, and donate on Patreon to give me the opportunity to keep writing these posts that inform the whole XR community! Thank you!
(Header image by Spatial)
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