Feb 15, 2024
With Apple Vision Pro, TeamViewer enters a new era of remote support
This article has been a long time coming. Since 2011, I’ve been dreaming about launching an app on AR glasses made by Apple. But now the dream is real, and Apple Vision Pro is shipping to eager consumer and enterprise customers alike. Alongside, TeamViewer has released an app that’s available right from day one on this revolutionary spatial computing device.
Introducing Spatial Support — our new app for the Apple Vision Pro. With its incredibly precise visualization, we’re raising the bar for how TeamViewer enterprise customers can help support their products in the field.
When we set out to bring our technology to the newest and most highly anticipated computing device of the last decade, we first spent time with our customers. This included many enterprises using our remote support solutions, including the coffee machine manufacturer Gruppo Cimbali and its users.
We needed to understand how a new level of spatial immersion — combined with our legacy of real-time connectivity — could deliver even more precise and effective remote support for our customers. With the Apple Vision Pro, the results were better than we could have imagined.
Revolutionizing troubleshooting and repairs
If you love your morning coffee like I do, you can probably imagine that servicing professional coffee machines is serious business. It requires constant work to keep hotels, local baristas, and office machines running at peak performance. Little surprise, then, that augmented reality (AR) and remote support have been a feature of this industry for many years. Indeed, for manufacturing and after-sales processes in general, this technology is now playing a central role.
Through our experience in that space, we’ve been exploring how to bring better fidelity to our customers in the service process. We’ve seen our technology used for remote access to the device to resolve technical issues within a machine. We’ve also built incredible 3D workflows using AR that guide new baristas through basic repair procedures. And we have seen the impact AR-powered remote assistance solutions have when it comes to after-sales support use cases where a remote expert is helping someone in the field, but we knew the bar could keep going higher.
With the Apple Vision Pro and advanced object-capture capabilities of iOS 17, we’re getting new opportunities for faster and more exact support. Our new Spatial Support app taps into this and is now helping customers from the manufacturing sector like Grupo Cimbali deliver even better remote repairs, maintenance, and faster troubleshooting.
It is exciting! With TeamViewer Spatial Support, two people can use live 3D collaboration to diagnose and work together on solutions to any issue. Instead of a lengthy phone call, the user on-site can scan the machine in front of them by using their iPhone. And then, like in the picture above, one user sees that 3D scanned representation of the machine in Apple Vision Pro while seeing the view of the technician or user in the field. At the exact same time, the other sees visual guidance like 3D markers overlaid on the camera view on their iPhone. It’s hard to describe in text just how high resolution this experience is.
With Spatial Support, the amount of detail is breathtaking. And this detail doesn’t just give us a ‘wow factor’. It also helps to understand the issue at hand better and more quickly.
If you think that a picture says a thousand words, then a session with Spatial Support is like a whole library. It can revolutionize remote support.
From an idea in the lab to first live use
At TeamViewer, we are always led by a desire to drive real value for our customers and their businesses when developing innovative solutions. We built TeamViewer Spatial Support with one question in mind: How do we best help our customers to support others?
When we first set out to create a solution with Apple Vision Pro, we had a lot of use cases to pull from and product concepts that we wanted to explore. Could we create a command center for remote support aimed at our Tensor power users? Could we extend our Frontline manufacturing or services workflow solution to visionOS?
The possibilities are endless. Ultimately, we didn’t want to just move a desktop or mobile experience to Apple Vision Pro. We wanted to do something that was unique and truly better in a spatial computing environment.
Thankfully, we had a huge head start in immersive design, spatial computing in practice, and developing with AR Kit, Unity, and other Apple technologies. We’d also been actively using object capture within our Frontline Spatial offering and got to the idea that we could use that alongside our core competency of remote support.
After a lot of iteration between our designers and engineering, we had our Spatial Support concept working nicely in the emulators. But seeing it in the Vision Pro itself is where the magic happens.
Being able to move your head inside a 3D scan of a machine, looking around and seeing incredible details like the air bubble in a small water hose, is a compelling experience. Remote support really has come a long way!
How to get started
When the Apple Vision Pro was announced, expectations were high after a decade of anticipation. And what we got was something special. In particular, the precision that it offers is second to none. With Spatial Support, we are now using this incredible innovative technology to deliver a gamechanger in remote support.
And the best thing? Equipped with an Apple Vision Pro, a TeamViewer Tensor license and our new Spatial Support app, customers can dive into immersive troubleshooting right away.
The new app offers the same proven experience of our remote support and assistance solutions on Mac and iOS. The only difference is its incorporation of new kinds of visualization from visionOS. And what a difference this makes!
