The human race loves a meeting. This coronavirus scenario has stopped many an office get-together due to social-distancing requirements and the world’s workforce has been forced to move their team briefs and catch-ups online.
Conferencing app Zoom (which certain aspects of the press are desperate to convince us not to trust) was the second most downloaded app on the App Store last week – second only to Tik-Tok – which apparently is definitely trying to spy on us.
If we are content to hold all our top-secret conferences across the internet – an internet, which remember, cannot seemingly keep your passwords and credit-card secrets safe for more than 20 seconds at a time then we might as well do them with the aid of a little virtual reality.
Spaces is a new app that allows you partake in your Google Hangout or zoom meetings in VR and early signs from testers are that it can help introduce some much-needed levity into those online Power-Point presentations.
Despite the idea being sound, the app got off to a rocky start with the developer – Spaces, choosing to call it something inappropriate and offensive to which the online fraternity responded with a collective, ‘er yeah we aren’t using that for our business while it’s called that.’
I don’t know what they were thinking but they changed it quick smart to bring things in line with what the rest of the world thinks, describing it as “a huge overside on our part”.
To get it to work you need to sign up for an account on the Spaces website, download it and run the file called “Run_Me_First.bat” = again, maybe a little thought going into things to stop it sounding like the kind of malware people install when they get an email they weren’t expecting.
Either way, we love VR and new VR tech at PC Guide – we will be covering this area much more closely in the coming months so anything that adds to what is out there already is welcome. We will keep a close eye on Spaces and see if it turns into something useful as our lockdowns go on.
