Visual collaboration is an idea composed of multiple parts to ensure that people of a business work together, regardless of location. Features include video conferencing, screen sharing, content sharing, and digital whiteboards. Most visual collaboration platforms mix these feature sets, along with other and sometimes proprietary features.
Visual collaboration features
Digital whiteboard platforms work to replicate the collaboration of people in a conference setting working through projects on a physical whiteboard for those teams in remote situations. These platforms offer an online whiteboard, often without borders, for flexible collaboration within teams. Team members can create cards and sticky-notes and post them to a board to help through a workflow.
Digital whiteboards tools can include:
- Communication through dragging and dropping cards or sticky-notes on a board, commenting or reacting to those cards or sticky-notes, and text-based communications
- Task management systems, project templates, and processes for visualizing workflows, processes, and tasks
- Visualized updates to work progress in real time
- Integrations for the whiteboard with existing communication, workflow, and project management systems
Digital whiteboard tools often include communication systems, which can be instant messaging text communications or chatroom-style text communications, and audio or video conferencing systems. There are also cloud-based and web-based visual collaboration tools, although most of these tools are cloud based. Cloud-based tools allow access to software applications running on shared computing resources, which can reduce the computing burden of users and allow for a wider selection of personal computing devices.
The digital whiteboard platforms often come in two types, with most platforms offering both at any time. Those types are synchronous and asynchronous:
- Synchronous collaboration occurs when team members are able to share information and ideas instantaneously. Examples of synchronous collaboration tools include instant messaging, chat rooms, and video and audio conferencing.
- Asynchronous collaboration occurs when team members communicate without the ability to instantly respond to messages or ideas. Examples of asynchronous virtual collaboration include e-mail, discussion boards, and application-specific groupware.
Video conferencing tools are often integrated into other collaboration tools and digital whiteboards and allow people to have face-to-face collaborative interactions. However, the capabilities for collaboration are platform dependent, ranging from standard text-based chats or screen sharing to deeper collaboration systems and visual collaboration systems with integrated face-to-face video chat. Video conferencing tools are one of the older collaboration tools and are often already built-in to many devices as their ubiquity has increased. Many of these tools have free versions or free trials before purchasing, so a user can discern which mixture of perks and purposes work best for different collaborative teams.
The difficulty of any remote collaboration tool, which was perhaps experienced first with video conferencing tools, is the network traffic or speeds. Networks have become better and many video services work in the cloud to help with the network latency. Prior to the use of cloud computing for video conferencing, network traffic was handled using proprietary protocols and codecs, the architecture of which is still used. The protocols handle network traffic streaming, while the codecs handle encoding the audio and video images into digital bits and bytes on the transmitting side and back to audio and video on the receiving side. This originally required proprietary cameras, microphones, dedicated servers, and often client-side applications that were also proprietary. Since then, newer hardware, while still requiring proprietary client software and an agreement on that software, is capable of using whatever webcam or microphone is included in a computer.
Remote work and related policies have recently changed due to both increased capabilities of technology and with the success experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic that caused a lot of people to have to work remotely. With these changes, virtual reality collaboration has moved beyond basic video conferencing and onscreen meetings. These technologies can now be used for brainstorming in 3D product design, data visualization, and joint efforts otherwise impossible to coordinate without face-to-face meetings. This is useful for industries such as architecture, engineering and construction, and healthcare. Virtual reality can also be more engaging than a video conference meeting because it places the users in the same virtual room and removes the distractions of a desk or multiple screens from those in the meeting. VR can also re-introduce a human element back into virtual meetings, such that team members can high-five each other and have a more human contact.
As well, VR can minimize a company's travel expenses and travel time, while still meeting in the same "room". This can also help an organization save on environmental expenses and impact, with a smaller carbon footprint. In two experiments with VR, a construction company used VR to enable meetings among four design, field, and virtual design and construction staff based in two cities, which was able to uncover issues and collaborate on solutions, such that the construction company found they saved money and time on the collaboration. VR is also being used to develop virtual workspaces or offices where coworkers can work on individual projects in the same room to have the feeling of being together.
