Virbela, VRtuoso, and Spatial Take Top Spots in ABI Research’s Immersive Collaboration Competitive Ranking

The increasingly hybrid workplace, spurred by the surge in remote workers, workflows shifting to the cloud, and a growing distributed workforce, is shining a spotlight on Communication and Collaboration (C&C) services. As companies work to support these hybrid workplaces, demand is also growing for more immersive solutions to better connect in-office and remote workers. To assist end-users to identify key attributes and to help evaluate early trailblazers within this segment, global tech market advisory firm, ABI Research, conducted an unbiased competitive assessment of early leaders. The ranking evaluated the level of innovation in each company’s solutions and their ability to implement these services to address the growing needs of the hybrid workforce now and into the future. The companies that rose to the top are:

• Market Leaders: Virbela, VRtuoso, Spatial, Walkabout Workplace
• Top Implementers: Virbela, Walkabout Workplace, Teamflow, Spatial
• Top Innovators: VRtuoso, Spatial, MeetinVR, Virbela, The Wild

Companies compiled for this assessment spanned two general categories of immersive C&C: XR collaboration and virtual HQ/offices. The overall leader, Virbela, best represents the fusion of these two categories with its support for VR HMDs, virtual offices, and campuses and support for huddle room sessions to large events. Competitor VRtuoso started with VR presentations to establish the largest user base but has since extended its reach to immersive real-time communications and other collaborative features. Spatial exemplifies the mixed collaborative environment by best integrating users across AR, VR, mobile, and PCs. On the VR front, MeetinVR helps ease the adoption of these immersive tools by excelling at onboarding new users and supporting a wide array of media and file formats. Teamflow and Walkabout Workplace highlighted the power and value of passive collaboration and virtualizing the physical workplace with lighter interfaces designed to run throughout the workday.

While the assessment avoided companies that were hyper-focused on certain industries or workflows (solutions in early access and beta stages were also removed from consideration), The Wild was included, despite its core competencies in AEC, to showcase how these targeted platforms can serve a wider audience.

“For a relatively nascent segment of the market, there are a rather large number of companies targeting this space. After paring down the list to the most impactful, eleven companies remained for this competitive assessment. Each offers unique and valuable solutions that represent core elements to what we believe will become the future of work,” notes Michael Inouye, Principal Analyst at ABI Research.

Despite XR having a slower market expansion than the early hype cycle suggested, there are already hundreds of thousands of users using VR/AR for collaboration, and extending it to the wider immersive collaborative market adds in hundreds of thousands more. Ongoing hardware advancements in the XR markets will engender iterative steps forward to make immersive collaboration an increasingly compelling segment of the C&C market and, in time, a critical piece of the future metaverse.

“Some of the most innovative companies created the strongest sense of presence, but there is still plenty of room left for innovation, particularly among user-representing avatars where only Spatial and Arthur in this list are enlisting some next-gen features. While it is still early days, we’ve already seen tremendous advancements in just the past two years, and we expect much more to come as we look to the future of collaboration, virtual and physical offices, and work as a whole,” Inouye concludes.

These findings are from ABI Research’s Immersive Collaborative Platforms Competitive Ranking report. This report is part of the company’s Next-Gen Content Technologies research service, which includes research, data, and ABI Insights. Competitive Ranking reports offer comprehensive analysis of implementation strategies and innovation, coupled with market share analysis, to offer unparalleled insight into a company’s performance and standing in comparison to its competitors.