The first 3 things you should know about 2D and 3D meeting tools.

Before Covid-19, we liked to work in workshops with highly interactive and liberating structures. We avoided using tables in a workshop room, allowing us to move around easily, with different spaces and atmospheres created for different tasks and sections. The pandemic forced us to conduct 100% of our work online. Using Zoom, MS Teams and other ordinary conference spaces worked fine, but we quickly realised that we are missing the flexibility that a physical space has. We also found it very hard to create informal structures where people could exchange or meet.

When we discovered 2D and 3D meeting spaces we realised they:
Give us the freedom in meetings to go where we would like to go, to examine and to interact with what or who we choose to interact with.
Allow us to roleplay a client before negotiations or to war-game how a competitor is going to behave, just as we used to do.
Let us do things we could not do in a real room, such as produce a wall out of thin air with links to a video of instructions on what to do next.

So what are the relative advantages/disadvantages of 2D vs. 3D systems? We have tried:
2D spaces with tools like wonder.me, gather.town and kumospace. They allow us to move easily in a space, to meet – or avoid – others in that space. We can then switch between groups easily as in a real room. These tools (and similar “office spaces”, such as Sococo and Ivicos Campus) are more flexible than Zoom, easy to use and do not need anything to be downloaded.
3D spaces with tools like AULA, Virbela, Tricat, Vispa, Immersive Terf and Mozilla Hubs. These tools allow us to move an avatar through rooms that are similar to a physical space. We can create different atmospheres and even switch avatars to role-play! However, 3D spaces demand more computer savvy from the user, and we have to download an app which raises IT security issues for many organisations.

In any case our clients will be discovering more and more these spaces in our events moving forward!
The next event that is open to everyone interested in strategic foresight and international development cooperation will be held in Immersive Terf on the 22nd of April. We will present scenarios and some strategic options for International Development Cooperation (IDC) that have been developed in a longer process with different tools and methods with a small expert team, and do a creative session on possible projects in IDC.
If you are interested to join, please send us an Email.