Technology is slowly emerging to take the COVID-19 business meeting to new heights. The introduction of 360-degree cameras allows remote participants to fully engage with the meeting, whether it takes place in an office setting, warehouse or some other remote location.
Avatour is at the forefront of this change, having brought to market the Avatour Real-Time 360-degree camera and meeting technology. Global logistics operator DB Schenker is one of the early adopters of the technology.
“The partnership with Avatour offers us a new dimension of digitization in the contract logistics business,” said Todd Starbuck, EVP of business development, solution design and customer management for DB Schenker. “It is essential for us and our operations to stay close to our customers.”
Devon Copley, co-founder and CEO of Avatour, said DB Schenker first adopted the camera technology to address top-line marketing, but the company’s use of the technology is expanding to include operational-level views.
“In the same way that videoconference has created a real, viable substitute of a conference meeting, Avatour is a real, viable substitute of a site meeting,” Copley said.
Copley and co-founder Prasad Balasubramanian, who serves as the company’s chief technology officer, first met years ago at Nokia, where they focused on developing the world’s first 360-degree camera. That project was ultimately scrapped by Nokia, but the duo used their knowledge to build Avatour, which has developed a “remote collaboration platform for site meetings.”
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The company was bootstrapped from its official launch in March 2020 (the beta version of the product launched in 2019) until April of this year when it landed a $2.9 million venture funding round. At that point, Avatour had $750,000 in annualized revenue, Copley said.
“Our hunch was that a communication product could deliver real business value today,” Copley said, noting that the day Avatour sent out its first press release announcing its technology, the news cycle was dominated by the NBA shutting down operations due to COVID.
“Clearly the pandemic played a role in opening the door for innovation,” Copley noted. “The first month we did a couple hundred thousand dollars of business.”
Sometimes, timing is everything.
Avatour is not a hardware company and uses an off-the-shelf 360-degree camera. What the company does is incorporate the images and video collected by the camera and put them into a virtual meeting room where remote participants can feel as though they are part of the meeting.
“What this means is that everyone on the call can look in a different direction,” Copley said. “We are sending all 360 degrees up to the cloud and everyone that is on the call can follow their own inspection. When we have 360 [visibility], we can stabilize that feed much more effectively than we can with a camera.”
Avatour is different from other remote systems, most of which use remote feed technology to broadcast a video from a single camera, iPad, etc., Copley explained. That means the remote viewer has only a single view of the location. When it comes to logistics operations, that single view often does not provide enough context to determine true business outcomes.
“We ‘stitch’ together those four images into a single sphere,” Copley said, adding that video can be captured in 2D or 360-degree images and the entire session is recorded, so the viewer can go back and change the camera angle after the fact to see different views or focus on other areas of the location.
Avatour is compatible with web browsers and popular virtual reality headsets such as Oculus, Vive and Pico.
“You have the experience of being in the location. You assume the position of the camera and instead of clicking the mouse you simply turn your head to look around and you can talk to the person that is there,” Copley said of VR headset usage. “The immersion you get from the headset is next level … where you really do have the experience of [being there].”
Copley said the company sees many uses for its technology, including warehouse and logistics, construction sites, and anywhere else that visual inspection is required. He said that companies using the technology can reduce travel expenses, but there is another benefit.
“The classic problem is when you go to a facility, you take a bunch of pictures and then get back and you don’t have the image of the thing you need,” he said. Avatour records all sessions and users can review those recordings and still change the image of the camera during that review period, allowing for additional inspection of new areas not seen during the initial meeting.
“We’re allowing you to have real-time experiences with space,” Copley said.
Click for more articles by Brian Straight.
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