Best Virtual Workplace Solution for Remote Teams
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What is flat.social?
Flat.social is a creative tool where remote teams can create permanent and collaborative virtual spaces for their teams and projects. Those can act as your remote team’s virtual office or a project space.
Flat.social lays at an intersection of a classic video call, multiplayer game, and a real-time whiteboard that allows hosts to customise the space (we call it a flat) that they are in. It brings freedom of movement into online meetings - everyone can fly around and speak with others in their proximity. This core mechanic brings up organic serendipity in digital conversations and allows them to flow naturally in a casual manner. Each flat runs a physics engine that makes the experience more interactive and playful.
Create a virtual workspace with flat.social
Flat.social allows your remote team to brainstorm, connect and collaborate in a fun virtual workspace that replicates the communicational dynamics of a physical office. At the core, every participant can move around and talk with others in proximity.
Creating your first virtual workspace is really simple - you only need to create a permanent space (takes less than minute) and distribute the link to your team.
What is a virtual workspace?
A virtual workspace is a simulated office space that sports communication and collaboration tools that replicate the experience of a physical office space. It can act as a collaborative hub for teams that work remotely and don’t have physical HQ where they can meet in person daily.
Setting up an online workspace is one of the best things that can be done to deliberately bring the team together and provide a space to interact - from fun coffee catchups to more serious meetings like daily stand-ups and retrospectives.
What can a remote team do in a virtual workspace?
A virtual workspace on flat.social is a flexible online meeting space which can be customised for many different use cases. Just like a physical office is not just a place to work, a virtual office can be also a place to organise all sorts of meetings - from creative ideations to virtual happy hours.
What are the benefits of a virtual workspace?
1. Improved team collaboration
When remote employees attend only the meetings that were scheduled for them, the process becomes goal-oriented and collaboration between different teams vanishes. Having a virtual workspace where peers from different departments and teams can meet to network helps the information flow, and ideation and prevents your company from fragmenting into tiny project-oriented silos.
2. Better employee experience
Employees of a remote company don’t have the same daily experience as the ones who work in a physical office. While that’s obvious, it comes with great implications in terms of how they connect. Imagine new team members joining a company that has a physical office. As the first days of the new exciting work continue, the new joiner will bump into different employees spontaneously during meetings, lunch breaks, and water-cooler moments.
New employees who join the company remotely don’t have this luxury. Scheduled meetings are usually goal-oriented and don’t focus on embedding the new member into the team culture and making sure that a proper welcome was given.
3. Reduced costs and expenses
While this applies to remote work in general, it shows the benefit of a having a virtual workplace pretty well. Physical offices, especially when located in capital cities around the world, are incredibly expensive. Add the cost of travel on top of that and the money spent is piling up.
Having a virtual office that replicates the experience of the physical one can provide most of the benefits while keeping the cost (both in money and time) low.
Movement and Interaction
With flat.social participants are not chained to a grid of tiny squares like they would in a classic videoconference. Instead, they can move around the rooms like they would in any multiplayer game.
Learn more about movement & interaction
Rooms & Activities
Your new virtual spaces can consist of multiple different types of rooms. Each room can be different - a mini-game, activity or something special for your team.
Dependently on the type of room, you will be able to host from 10 to 100 simultaneous guests.
See rooms & activities available
Spatial Media
By default each guest can only hear & see others around. Spatial audio and video allows for more natural and spontaneous conversations that are based on proximity, not on the loudest guests.
Want to speak with someone? Simply fly up!
Learn more about spatial audio & video
Collaborative, real-time whiteboard
Add colorful drawings, images, stickers, sticky notes and much more. Whichever room or activity type you choose, you can use it as a real-time collaborative whiteboard.
Build your own space
Build your own virtual space for your team or event by selecting from many of the available rooms and activities.
Each room is special and can be placed in whichever position you want. Fancy a quick retreat on the beach? Simply add the beach elements into your space :)
Physics 💫
Expression
It's so much more than just a plain video-chat. Guests in a flat.social meeting can express themselves through a variety of virtual gestures and customizations on how they present themselves.
From becoming a godzilla to doing a frog dance, it's all built to be playful and interactive.
Presentations and Screensharing
Engage your guests with interactive presentations and talks by using the spatial screen sharing and broadcasting features! Whether you're giving a talk or want to present something with a real-time video stream, sharing the live screenshare will be an experience that seamlessly integrates into the virtual space.
Frequently asked questions
What are the fun features of flat.social?
From flying around to playing football and doing a frog dance, there is plenty! We built those features to make flat.social the most fun place to organise an event online. Read more features that we built.
Is there a need to install anything?
No need to install anything new. It all runs in the web browser both on desktop and mobile. Safari and Chrome are doing great, Firefox is catching up!
Do you support simultaneous screensharing?
Yep, a number of participants can screenshare at the same time. Those can be positioned next to each other or distributed in various locations around the virtual space.
How much does it cost?
Check out thepricing page to see free and pro plans available.
Can I use it as an alternative to ZOOM or Microsoft Teams?
Sure, if all you do is fun and creative meetings! (we sincerly hope so:)
Over the past 3 years we learned that while ZOOM and Microsoft teams are amazing tools to keep you productive, they're not optimized to to keep a group of people connected, engaged and happy.
Hence, flat.social was created. It does not aim to be a complete replacement - it's an addition for when the priorities switch from productivity to human interaction. It's here to bring smile and show that spontanous creative moments and connections can happen without having to travel to an office or an event venue.
How do participants move in a flat.social meeting?
Meeting attendees can use WASD keys like in multi-player games or drag themselves around with a mouse.
How do I speak to all of the guests at once?
The experience is spatial by default - only ones around will hear you. You can however use the loudspeaker feature to speak to everyone at once. It's useful if you want to make an announcement or managing a larger workshop where attendees are distributed around the room.
