by: VMware Director, Global AV and Events Josh Burton and VMware Global AV Services Product Manager Jal Chen
During VMworld 2021, Workspace One XR Hub was announced. This technology delivers the digital workspace to virtual reality (VR) devices. This enterprise solution can connect colleagues in immersive ways for training, remote collaboration and design.
In 2018, VP (now VMware CIO) Jason Conyard challenged us to develop a solution to connect distributed teams to our campus activities, events and culture. We identified different opportunities that VR could fit into existing workflows, like human resources, sales, training and enablement.
Working with the business units, Global IT sought to understand what problems these teams were trying to solve with VR. Ultimately, everybody needed to deploy different applications with different devices and requirements. There is no device management for these XR tools available in the market, so we saw an opportunity. Global IT had to solve the device management problem.
The Workspace One team sought to tap into the ecosystem of unified device management, fitting into the existing strategy of any device, any cloud and any service that VMware offers. We partnered with the individual teams to get their unique requirements to solve this problem.
The installation package format deployed is needed to control the personalized experience. Getting this technology to our colleagues should not be different from shipping laptops and mobile devices. Therefore, we worked with the client engineering team and the Workspace One product team. We constructed the checkout feature so we could provide these devices with all the security requirements to allow the launch of the individual applications.
We saw the opportunity to create a productivity environment where we could open 2D applications in the 3D space, ultimately creating a personalized digital workspace with infinite desktops.
The team wanted to enhance collaboration, increasing the requirements and features in the product today. Then we had to connect 7,000 remote employees. Our new goal is to connect 34,000 employees to a distributed workforce.
We see a future of immersive experiences deployed in the same way headsets are. We can push an experience to someone over Workspace One, and they can consume it in their desktop application or their mobile application suites. If needed, we can provision and ship the headset so that someone can utilize it that way.
This technology must allow one colleague to join on Zoom, another through virtual campus and yet another on VR. All users must share the ability to meet and collaborate in the same horizontal space without any friction.
Our colleagues are actively checking out two hundred and fifty headsets from our deployment centers. Multiple solutions are in pilot programs on a path to production. There are different service areas around the virtual campus that we’re developing with the real estate team. We’re working with our sales team to create presentations they can use. Human resources use VR to facilitate onboarding, scenario-based training, immersive presentations and keynotes.
Whether spatial computing, 360° campus tour or immersive construction and interior design, VR is expanding the boundaries of what’s possible with how we work. As a result, Global IT is actively creating new apps and solutions to offer innovative opportunities and possibilities with this exciting technology.
Check out more of our virtual reality blogs.
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