STUD: Cohere - A VR application for teams working together, while apart.

Cohere is a Virtual Reality (VR) application for remote workshops in cross-disciplinary teams. The application is built to increase engagement and better communication by bringing natural body language back to remote collaboration. A workshop is a tool for cross-disciplinary problem solving through creative exercises. Teams with different skill sets meet to discuss and share different perspectives of a given problem. While working remote can be great, teams have lost their space for creative collaboration. Cross-disciplinary communication suffers without the aid of body language. Meanwhile, organisations are looking for ways to adapt to remote work, and research conducted at SINTEF shows that remote employees experience higher levels of loneliness and anxiety. Using Cohere, teams can utilise Design Thinking tools such as post-its, drawings, timers, and dot voting. Spatial audio allows multiple groups to have conversations in the same digital space without interrupting each other. Mini-games help groups get energised, while instructions and guides make facilitators feel at ease. Data generated during workshops can be brought anywhere or exported to be used in other parts of people?s workflow. During the STUD-ENT project, we conducted several projects with some of Norway's largest companies. These customers cover a wide range of industries, including energy, finance, logistics, media, and paint/coatings. This variety helped us find commonalities among user needs while capturing varied perspectives and minute differences in individual use cases. During the project, we found evidence to suggest that there are commonalities between the development of VR and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, as users progress through addressing their physical needs, gaining a sense of safety and then seeking belonging and participation in a group. This theory forms the basis for our approach to the further development of Cohere, with a goal of stimulating natural social engagement in VR.

Cohere has enabled teams from some of Norway's largest companies to be creative, without being physically together. Furthermore, Cohere XR will enter a research study with SINTEF to research the effect that XR tools can have on remote collaboration, which will be published in early 2023. Cohere has reduced travel for several of the teams that were partners during the project period. While we do not have an exact data point, this has been confirmed by our partners.