AUGMENTED REALITY
ZOFFICE
Build with love & warmth of human touch, ZOFFICE empowers remote working. It's powered by MERN, face recognition & Socket.IO.
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OVERVIEW
Remote working will end after Covid-19
“The pandemic has pushed employees and customers online at an unprecedented pace, creating an urgent imperative for rapid digital transformation” --- Boston Consulting Group, 2020
“While a lot of those in the workforce want to have the flexibility work from home, reports show that only highly educated, well-paid minority will be allowed for hybrid models of remote work.” --- McKinsey, 2020
The pandemic has revealed a glaring gap between physical office's interface and virtual office's. The ZOFFICE team sees unprecedented market opportunity to solve this global workforce problem with augmented reality. We aimed to build an improved user experience through bringing human warmth to the virtual office's interface, where you can feel the presence of your team, just as in the past.
ZOFFICE Team
Cora Wan, Team Lead
Disha Shah, Chief Art Director
Fiona Ho, Chief Tech Officer
Victoria You, Chief UX Officer
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CHALLENGES
Balance privacy and shared presence in the augmented reality
It is human nature that we resist change. The most common office communication interface, such as email and instant messaging systems, has been around for decades. In order to engage the modern workforce in the new normal, ZOFFICE’s interface must take a new look that not only match with users’ existing habits and expectations, but also having extra charms to appeal to them.
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STRATEGY
Gamified office floor playing to evolutionary psychology
We have disrupted traditional virtual office interface and created a gamified office floor with users' avatars either be seated at their own cubicles or in a meeting room when they are meeting with other colleagues. Meanwhile, we retain many functionalities of an office communication app, such as group chat and direct messaging, preserving users' existing comfort zone.
To synchronise the real time presence of team members, we will capture a user’s face with the WebRTC technology and run the image through LUXAND face recognition API to verify a user’s online status every 15 minutes.
Taking a workplace with office hours from 9am to 6pm as an example, an employee’s presence will be verified four times an hour for eight hours. If a user missed a window to be verified, they will notice their absence in the virtual office floor right away, thus they can log in again to stay online and visible to other members.
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ZOFFICE represents an upgraded office interface that extends remote working to the modern workforce even after the global pandemic is over. Central to the design of ZOFFICE is extending human touch and warmth offered by a physical office to a virtual office. Staff will be able to see their colleagues’ avatars be seated next to them, sharing a sense of mutual presence even in a virtual office.
While retaining an office communication application’s functionalities, including personal profile, audio & video streaming, group chat and direct messaging services, ZOFFICE adds value by rendering the presence of your team through augmented reality.
We have built ZOFFICE 1.0 with MERN stack, WebRTC, GraphQL and Socket.IO, giving rise to a fully functioning office social network that allows staff to connect and communicate with each other with full comfort of mutual presence.
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