Arthur announces major updates to its collaborative Virtual Reality platform, including expanded room capacity of 50+ participants

In Virtual Reality News

May 6, 2021 – Arthur, a virtual reality (VR) office space provider that enables businesses to create virtual offices and hold fully immersive collaborative meetings, has today announced major product updates that are now live on its platform for users. The updates include photorealistic avatars with lip-syncing, audio zones for private conversations in subgroups of people, a breakthrough in increased VR room capacity, as well as speech-to-text capabilities. 

As a VR solution used by Fortune 500 companies and organizations in a variety of industries, including the United Nations, Arthur enables large-scale immersive collaborative sessions in a remote environment, allowing users to build virtual office spaces with permanency features. As the need for remote connectivity solutions has increased over the last year as a result of the pandemic, and as companies rethink their collaboration models, Arthur’s offerings have become a must-have for many businesses, particularly global companies that are geographically dispersed.

“While most VR platforms offer simple meetings with a few people, Arthur is mainly used for large-scale brainstorming sessions with whiteboards, flow charts and other complex meetings in real-time. We are making the virtual office a highly sought-after solution for the enterprise space, combining a collaborative and highly productive meeting environment with realistic settings to meet with colleagues and coworkers, such as a coffee bar,” said Christoph Fleischmann, Founder and CEO of Arthur. “Since our launch in December 2020, we’ve received great feedback from our professional users on how they’re currently using the platform, and how they’d like to use it for virtual collaboration going forward. We’re continuously finding ways to adapt to the evolving needs of our clients and are looking forward to what’s next for Arthur.”

The Arthur platform has two models – ‘Professional’ (currently in beta) and ‘Consumer’ (intended for startups and individual professionals), both of which are currently available on Oculus devices. The updates for each model include:

Professional

  • Self-generatable, photorealistic avatars with accurate lip synchronization and various wardrobe options;
  • Expanded room capacity of more than 50 participants in VR;
  • Audio zones;
  • Speech-to-text capabilities.

Consumer

  • Photorealistic avatars with accurate lip synchronization and various wardrobe options. 
New photorealistic avatars in Arthur.

Both models will be receiving updates to room capacity and photo realistic avatars, allowing them to be built from an image of the user.

Audio zones are also being introduced in this update to the Professional model. This new feature allows people to hold private conversations with a subgroup of people within a meeting, serving as a privacy bubble.

Arthur’s new audio zone bubbles for private chats within meetings.

Additionally, this update unlocks speech-to-text capabilities in the Professional model, allowing users to simply record their voice to generate written text labels or private notes, helping to increase the speed in which they can work and reducing the need for VR controllers or a Bluetooth keyboard to type.

The platform now has speech-to-text functionality, saving users from having to type notes whilst in VR.

Finally, in addition to the user-facing feature updates, Arthur has also focused on further expanding the scalability of its virtual office. With efficiency increases in the new avatar system, Arthur’s professional model can now hold more than 50 people in the same room simultaneously, while still ensuring a high-quality meeting without glitches.

Arthur recently announced the launch of its platform on the Oculus store. For more information on Arthur, please visit the company’s website. For a demonstration of the virtual reality collaboration platform, please get in touch.

Image credit: Arthur

About the author

Sam Sprigg

Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.