Superviz

 
 
POSTED: August 9, 2020
 
 
 
 
 

And now just when I had posted to say that

Things have never really taken off in the ways that people like Philip Rosedale expected, and certainly nobody has yet found a compelling business (”adult”) use for experiences like Second Life.

along comes Superviz. According to Hypergrid Business

SuperViz is a browser-based platform that supports 360-degree videos, and thus allows users to attend or host any virtual event, and attend conferences and meetups without any need to download any app on their device, and the user does not need to wear a virtual reality headset to use it.

With SuperViz, companies can host small and large group meetings virtually, and compared to real-world location meetups, it solves a real problem during the coronavirus pandemic.

“We did see a big increase in usage since the pandemic hit,” Lateefa Farah, a SuperViz spokesman, told Hypergrid Business.”Around five times.”

The app uses a hybrid of virtual reality mode and non-virtual reality mode because virtual reality is still evolving, company co-founder and CEO Russ Rive told Hypergrid Business.
Russ Rive

“SuperViz started out as a purely virtual reality experience, but we quickly realized that most people are not ready for a pure virtual reality experience, and it was important to have cross-platform compatibility,” said Rive. “This will be a continuing trend in virtual reality collaboration tools – collaboration across multiple devices.”

It looks like an unholy combination of Second Life and Zoom. Everyone participating in a meeting has their webcam image on the right of the screen and a simplistic avatar representing them in the virtual environment occupying the rest of the screen.

I looked around the Superviz website, and I could not work out what it gave me that Zoom didn’t. Why, I asked myself, would I want to be in Cartoonsville while at the same time I could see everyone else in the meeting onscreen?

I have no idea at all, I answered myself.

I will try to engineer a meeting in Superviz to see if the experience works better than the description of it. We will see.