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Saxo Virtual Environment
Saxo Bank has over 1600 employees working out of offices all over the world. They hold meetings and presentations daily in both the head office and also between their various global locations. They use traditional meeting software to facilitate this such as Outlook and Skype. However, the efficiency and quality of these interactions can often be sub-optimal, unnatural and cause undue stress to the participants. Saxo has always been a software company at heart providing cutting edge tools for their clients and saw an opportunity to initiate a research and development project to investigate how cutting edge immersive computing technology such as Virtual Reality could be used to enhance meetings and collaborations between employees across their global offices and reduce travel costs by reducing the need for face to face meetings. Saxo Bank’s internal VR research development team partnered up with Unity-Studios who have a long history in building cutting edge Virtual Reality solutions and together they co-developed what is now called the “Saxo Virtual Environment”. This solution includes many bespoke components that allow extremely immersive collaboration between people located anywhere on earth. With a background in building highly scalable secure trading platforms, Saxo employed this knowledge to architect a secure software foundation that is comprised of “Lego bricks”. Each of these Lego bricks allows new functionality to be plugged into the Saxo Virtual Environment (SVE) in a modular way. We began with building a foundation to allow people to connect into the system from anywhere in the world using either a PC or a VR headset. The participants can walk around and talk to each other as though they are co-present in the same space. Then we added the ability to create virtual TV screens. These screens allow users to draw on them, show images or slideshows to each other and can be any size and pinned to walls or just float in the air. Next, we added the ability to stream existing PC screens into the virtual environment and share them with everyone in the room. This allows people to continue to use traditional PC software from within the virtual environment. We built a bespoke streaming solution that allows up to 20 screens to be shared simultaneously to all people in the meeting. Lastly, we developed a solution to record every single thing that happens in a virtual meeting. Every spoken word, every movement by each participant and every screen and the contents on it can be recorded. This allows people who couldn’t attend the meeting to replay the meeting after it has occurred. But unlike a normally recorded video, the user can walk around freely inside the “meeting recording”, rewinding “reality” and re-watching key moments. Interaction is very natural because you just point with your hands or gesture as you would in real life. The Saxo Virtual Environment allows Saxo Employees to hold efficient meetings between geographic offices that are much closer to how they interact with local colleagues. People can attend from their offices, hotel rooms or homes and join a fully immersive collaborative reality! https://www.unity-studios.com/cases/saxobank/ Background Saxo Bank has over 1600 employees working out of offices all over the world. They hold meetings and presentations daily in both the head office and also between their various global locations. They use traditional meeting software to facilitate this such as Outlook and Skype. However, the efficiency and quality of these interactions can often be sub-optimal, unnatural and cause undue stress to the participants. This can be due to many factors such as when people cannot see and react to body language when the other participants are only on the telephone or in small video windows. The participants do not feel that the quality of collaboration with remote colleagues is as rich as when doing it between people locating in the same office. Meetings often have a presenter who shares a screen and the other participants are merely watching but not actively participating in the collaboration. On top of this, employees often travel to the head office to participate in key meetings and training which is costly. Saxo has always been a software company at heart providing cutting edge tools for their clients and saw an opportunity to initiate a research and development project to investigate how cutting edge immersive computing technology such as Virtual Reality could be used to enhance meetings and collaborations between employees across their global offices and reduce travel costs by reducing the need for face to face meetings. The initial aim of the research was to identify what was possible with Virtual Reality and build a foundation to allow secure multi-user collaboration between employees wherever they are in the world. Everything they do in a normal Skype meeting such as video and screen sharing should be possible with extra additional features made possible by Virtual Reality. Solution Saxo Bank’s internal VR research development team partnered up with Unity-Studios who have a long history in building cutting edge Virtual Reality solutions and together they co-developed what is now called the “Saxo Virtual Environment”. This solution includes many bespoke components that allow extremely immersive collaboration between people located anywhere on earth. With a background in building highly scalable secure trading platforms, Saxo employed this knowledge to architect a secure software foundation that is comprised of “Lego bricks”. Each of these Lego bricks allow new functionality to be plugged into the Saxo Virtual Environment (SVE) in a modular way. We began with building a foundation to allow people to connect into the system from anywhere in the world using either a PC or a VR headset. The participants can walk around and talk to each other as though they are co-present in the same space. Then we added the ability to create virtual TV screens. These screens allow users to draw on them, show images or slideshows to each other and can be any size and pinned to walls or just float in the air. Next, we added the ability to stream existing PC screens into the virtual environment and share them to everyone in the room. This allows people to continue to use traditional PC software from within the virtual environment. We built a bespoke streaming solution that allows up to 20 screens to be shared simultaneously to all people in the meeting. Lastly, we developed a solution to record every single thing that happens in a virtual meeting. Every spoken word, every movement by each participant and every screen and the contents on it can be recorded. This allows people who couldn’t attend the meeting to replay the meeting after it has occurred. But unlike a normal recorded video, the user can walk around freely inside the “meeting recording”, rewinding “reality” and re-watching key moments. Interaction is very natural because you just point with your hands or gesture as you would in real life. The Saxo Virtual Environment allows Saxo Employees to hold efficient meetings between geographic offices that are much closer to how they interact with local colleagues. People can attend from their offices, hotel rooms or homes and join a fully immersive collaborative reality! Result Being a company that invests heavily in software development, one of the desired goals for this research project for Saxo Bank was to gain experience developing Virtual Reality software solutions and improve internal expertise in this area. This has been a big success and Saxo is now able to build new Virtual Reality experiences and software easily due to a solid foundation with the Saxo Virtual Environment. Through the iterative process of building the Saxo Virtual Environment, Saxo Bank now has a very good understanding of the positive impact of Virtual Reality and also, its current limitations. We have successfully shown the ability to digitize the entire meeting space into a virtual environment and allow more efficient natural interactions between employees for lower cost than expensive meeting facilities. Rollout to global offices has not occurred yet due to some limitations in the hardware but as future technology improves, Saxo will adapt the foundation to support future state hardware and business needs. The SVE has been used to create interactive demos and experiences that have been shown at internal and external sales and marketing events allowing users to catch a glimpse of future working practices. The development team for the project has used the Saxo Virtual Environment daily to hold design and status meetings and this has proven very successful based on feedback. Through hundreds of demos, awareness inside the bank of this technology has grown and inspired people about future ways of working.
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