Online Collaboration and Distance Learning

Business the New Normal in 2020

Sep 28, 2020

I think we can all agree that 2020 and what has happened with the global pandemic has started a new era for many subjects in business. Many thousands of companies globally are doing business online, and for many millions of people, for the first time.

Watch the video version of this content with discussion, examples, and rather amazing dancers.

This Exploratorium is about next generation video communication and new business models, such as Online Talent Sharing, Long Distant Learning & Remote Collaborating.

These are super hot topics that $100’s of millions of dollars are being poured into by investors.

Some quick stats:

The market size of the global video conferencing industry is predicted to reach $6.4 USD billion in total value by the end of 2020
Zoom Video Conferencing has over 300 Million users a day world wide in 2020, a more than 200% increase in just a fe months
The virtual reality market for enterprises is another one of the fast-growing segments of the video conferencing industry. It’s expected to reach $5.5 billion USD by 2023.
North America is the dominant video conferencing market due to high technology adoption and innovations.
The Asia Pacific region is said to be one of the fastest-growing regions of the video conferencing industry.

What we are really excited to show you is how we might bring the world of Pop Dance into this new online era. We discovered an exploding new market amongst young people all over the world who are diving into this trend for its music, moves, and pop culture.

Originated in the United States, it’s now central to the dance scene in Paris and Rome even at the top schools of art and dance.
By connecting a few of these subjects, we are making an underground art relevant to topics of global importance.

This project is much bigger than just helping teachers organize and share media content.

There are a complex set of subjects to understand when going into how people relate, interact and work together.

We discovered through research & interviews with teachers that this global problem with students feeling isolated, creating critically low learning retention across all subjects.

So we started out with the intention to explore creating an open platform for video communication, and an information architecture created for businesses to easily manage and control the sharing of their content as well as connect more personally to their students.

Students have a hard time understanding both the relevance to the subjects and the context of the subject by remote. The ritual of going to a specialized space to practice, work and learn has been a normal human trait for centuries. Now everyone is stuck at home doing everything in the same space.

Creating an environment that both connects people and gives thematic relevance and culture to the communications will be a huge plus.

Considerations

Telepresence & Video Conferencing has become a key part of everyone’s life

There are Decades of research on collaboration tools, which is already a difficult thing. Adding distance, technology becomes a huge barrier between people
Test show that the diverse backgrounds typical to group video calls change the hierarchy of importance and create a lot of distraction
Camera angle, position, lighting, and relation of camera to display create emotional separation which makes both trust and understanding difficult
We discovered that full body images showing body language create a great deal more trust & understanding enabling experiencing togetherness.

We are experimenting with “Spatial Consistency” that creates a more democratized experience and focuses the direction of group energies

The Next Generation Video Communication

Once there was YouTube. The trouble is, there is a very bad system for businesses to organize their media content for these contemporary issues.

We are creating a solution set that is an environment and a system to connect people for all of these aspects for Dance.

An interesting challenge in particular is around collaboration through live video conference. Dancers that work in groups such as hip hop became a compelling place to dive into.

We answered the question, metaphoric to all teams working remote: how might a dance group collaborate when they are in separate spaces? [VIDEO]