Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas 2022 – Agora’s Real-Time Engagement Platform
Agora is leading the way toward a new frontier of learning, wellness, work collaboration, gaming, socializing and much more. Over the past decade information technologies have increasingly become an important part of daily lives throughout the world. And Agora has delivered live interactive voice and video that provides meaningful human-to-human connections across the globe.
It is in part a result of these continued efforts that Fast Company has selected Agora’s Real-Time Engagement (RTE) Platform as a finalist for its World Changing Ideas 2022 award.
Every year Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Awards honor the businesses and organizations driving change in the world. This year in the Workplace category, Fast Company selected Agora as a Finalist to recognize the company’s innovations in connecting virtual worlds of the metaverse to the physical one.
In fact, today, Agora’s metaverse solutions provides the building blocks to create branded virtual worlds at any scale, with a diverse toolset that works reliably across the globe and across any industry verticals such as gaming, enterprise, collaboration, education, and health.
The Metaverse and The Workplace
The global pandemic drastically accelerated the speed at which the world began adopting new technologies and an increased digital way of life, especially in the workplace. At the same time, Agora’s RTE platform is quickly becoming the operating system for metaverses, reducing the barrier to entry by simplifying access to these new worlds.
The platform can bridge the gap between the virtual and physical worlds delivering connectivity from one-to-one to one-to-many using smartphone apps and desktop apps.
As more work is performed within these virtual words anyone with a web browser will be able to participate. Of course, in addition to the workplace, this will be leveraged for health and wellness, education, social, gaming and much more. The ability to connect to a metaverse without expensive equipment will be democratizing for those who either don’t have access or can’t afford it.
The Power of Real-Time Engagement
For example, Agora’s pre-integration of its Video Software Developer Kit (SDK) with the HTC VIVE Sync App, a remote collaboration and meeting application, now allows seamless remote collaboration between HTC VIVE users and non-VR users within the same virtual environment.
The Agora SDK allows for collaborative file and screen sharing in virtual meetings both inside and outside the virtual world. This early partnership is building essential foundational devices that will be needed for the metaverse to be used for collaborative applications in education, enterprise environments, and just about any applications creators can conceive.
Cher Wang, CEO of HTC wrote: “The Agora RTE solution is the platform needed to bridge the virtual and physical world, providing everyone a unique view into what’s happening within the virtual world and be able to interact with it. Its ease of use is an important piece of our innovation puzzle in creating meaningful human connections. Tapping Agora’s expertise in RTE brings that vital human element into spaces powered by AR and XR. By bringing this champion of RTE into the HTC VIVE ISV Partner Program, we are providing developers with a crucial piece of the innovation puzzle—human connection. As we look toward a future defined by VR and XR, we feel confident that with Agora beside us, we will continue to make our combined offerings increasingly accessible to all developers.”
Connecting Worlds is Challenging
Outside of Agora’s platform, connecting the virtual world with the physical one is fraught with delays, latency breaks and general disruptions that wreck the required illusions to operate in the metaverse world. However, Agora’s Real-time engagement platform data transmission is handled by our Software-Defined Real-Time Network (SD-RTN™); a sophisticated edge network that algorithms continuously monitor and optimize data transmission paths, minimizing latency and packet loss while enabling high-quality real-time engagement across millions of concurrent users.
Traditionally, access to virtual worlds has required a headset, but now they are accessible via smartphone apps and desktop apps. Agora’s powerful network enables users to easily connect their physical world into their virtual environments.
Please see our Metaverse Solutions here.
About the Fast Company Award Process
A panel of eminent Fast Company editors and reporters selected winners and finalists from a pool of more than 2,997 entries across transportation, education, food, politics, technology, health, social justice, and more. In addition, several new categories have been added this year including climate, nature, water, and workplace. The 2022 awards feature entries from across the globe, from Switzerland to Hong Kong to Australia.