With a team of mostly remote workers needing to collaborate on creative projects regularly, Starmark launched VR HQ — a virtual reality office setting in which its team members could meet and share ideas more quickly, conveniently, and effectively.
Objective
The goal of Starmark's VR HQ was simple: Create an ideal place for the team to collaborate, especially when prototyping and reviewing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) work. Additionally, having a virtual reality office would give the organization's distributed team a sense of place.
Context
Though the team at Starmark has been meeting in VR for years now, the launch of the brand's VR HQ is a first. Starmark actually used one of its sprint retrospectives — which always take place in VR — to surprise the team with the unveiling of the VR HQ.
Target Audience
Starmark employees were the primary audience. The team is highly collaborative and prefers to create together. Additionally, they're a team of individuals distributed throughout the country. Some of them are based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., but many employees are remote.
Creative and Media Strategy
Using the Engage platform was a natural fit for this project because building dimensional AR and VR content in VR is just much, much more intuitive than doing it in a 2D medium. Engage gave Starmark a stable, multi-user environment and the ability to make its VR HQ persistent, so people could jump into it for a quick ad-hoc meeting at any time.
This was a 100 percent mobile effort. Most of the team members at Starmark use the VR HQ from within Meta Quest 2 headsets. But one of the best things about the Engage platform was that it made accessible from a laptop or a mobile app. This additional accessibility made it a breeze to get together, even if someone was away from home without their headset.
Since VR HQ was an in-house effort created for Starmarkers, by Starmarkers, the organization didn't track its budget, per se. But it did put time parameters and a phased roadmap together to launch an MVP version and then add new features and functionality over time.
Before creating its VR HQ, the Starmark team was sick of long Zoom or Google Hangouts meetings. They were a necessary part of collaborative work creation, but hanging out together on a video call for three hours to rapid prototype a trade show display is a bit taxing.
Not only is the team more consistently engaged when meeting in the immersive VR HQ, but being able to experiment with our VR and AR ideas in a shared 3D environment has actually shortened the speed to launch on several recent projects. Because they're all in the same place and communicating ideas, team alignment around individual ideas makes it much faster to get a product up and running without a lot of revisions.
In addition to reducing the speed to market on recent projects, the VR HQ now also serves as a virtual portfolio where Starmark employees can show prospective clients the company's VR chops — in VR.
