Collaboration

When participating in a collaboration session, there are things to consider, such as whether you will participate from your desktop, through VR, or the Stream App. Let's look at what you will need:

Connections Requirements

• Network connection - To access the collaboration session and VRED file.
• Internet connection - To send/receive invites.

Hardware Requirements

• VRED system requirements - To guarantee your machine meets the VRED requirements, as well as the additional VR specific requirements. This ensures that your graphics card and GPU meet the demands of the content.

• VR Devices - See Supported VR Devices.

  Note:

  At present, only the HTC Vive and Oculus support the Collaboration tool's VR Room configurations. All other devices should only be used for testing purposes. See Correctly Setting Up the Tracking System for more information.

• Mobile Devices - The device must be connected to the same network as the host. Check out the Stream User for additional information.

• Audio - To minimize outside noise and potential disruptions, we recommend a noise-cancelling mic and headphones.

Software Requirements

The VRED collaboration session is designed to work side-by-side with your current, audio conferencing, email, and calendar apps. These are needed, as they are not included as part of VRED.

• Matching version of VRED - To participate, all participants must use the same version of VRED. This is defined by the first session participant.
• Calendar application - To send/receive meeting invites.
• Email application - To send/receive invites.
• Audio application - To communicate with others. The session leader will set this up using a service, such as Zoom, Skype, or Mumble.

You will find information on what desktop and VR participants should expect and require, how scenes work in a collaboration session, and room calibration. For mobile users, check out the Stream User.

Collaboration Participants

A collaboration participant is a user running VRED and connected to a collaboration session. They are represented as avatar in MR/VR and stream users connected to their stream see what they see. There are two kinds of collaboration session participants:

Desktop Participants

Desktop participants have full control over a scene. They can switch Variants Sets, trigger animations, and transform parts of the scene, as well as navigate within it. In a session, desktop participants appear as a tablet.

VR Participants

VR participants have full control over the scene. They can switch Variants Sets and trigger animations within the scene and navigate via the teleporter. In a session, VR participants appear as a robotic humanoid.

Please refer to VR Room Setup to ensure everything is set up correctly for the best and safest experience.

How Scenes Work in Collaboration

Since things work a bit differently in a collaboration session, it is important to understand how scenes work.

Participants can trigger things like Variant Sets and animation. When this happens, VRED uploads only these actions to participants, not the entire scene. It only syncs the changed information. This is why we stress that all participants use the same scene file during the collaboration session. This guarantees everyone sees the same thing. Participants not using the same scene will experience issues with information syncing, resulting in errors and not seeing changes.

There are limitations to the information synced. Though Variant Sets, animations, and transformations are synced, new geometry added to the scene is not. However, if participants upload the scene after changes have been made, even newly created geometry, variants, variant sets, and animation are synced.

Workstations with VRED Pro and Design both installed cannot be the host of a collaboration session. Here is a workaround for this issue:

1. Only install either VREDPro or VRED Design on the PC.
2. Adjust the firewall rule.
3. Manually call VREDClusterService -e -c once.

This section is for anyone who needs to configure an alternative port for the VRED Collaboration feature. The default collaboration TCP port is 8889 and can get overloaded by other VRED services also accessing this port. Changing the port used will fix this.

The cluster service has to be started with the option -p NNNN.

For example, on Linux, in a terminal window, go to the VRED installation directiory, then enter the following:

cd bin
clusterService -e -c -p NNNN

On Windows, in a terminal window, go to the VRED installation directory, then enter the following:

cd bin\WIN64
VREDClusterService -e -c -p NNNN

Though there is nothing that needs to be done before starting a VRED collaboration sessions, here are some suggestions:

• Customize your Collaboration and Virtual Reality preferences
• Review VR room setup if working with multiple people in the same real-world space
• Check out the functionality in the Collaboration module
• Set up a collaboration session
• For VR users, learn about your controller, how to get around in your scene, and how to access tools
• Add custom controls to the xR Home Menu
• Review safety information and requirements