Visiting satellite offices or collaborating with business partners across the globe used to only be possible through long business trips, costing companies time and money, and increased their carbon emissions. Then came along applications like Zoom, Skype, and Teams which allowed everyone to chat and see the faces of their collaborators and in turn enabled businesses to cut costs on travel and therefore emissions.

But, as many of us experienced during the pandemic, too many online meetings and a case of “zoom fatigue” is not ideal for business. One French startup envisioned a better way to have remote meetings before the pandemic even began.

La Vitre is a human-sized, stand-up screen that allows you to “teleport” anywhere in the world and connect with people instantly and on a daily basis. Their solution is placed in two different spaces to connect one locale to another. It can be used to conduct daily business meetings between separate offices, to connect speakers to an audience in far away events, allow experts to help clients in retail spaces, or even permit trainers to onboard multiple teams from different locations.

A true remote-friendly solution, la Vitre is helping quite the range of industries outside the obvious office solution: engineering, hospitality, manufacturing, restaurants – it has even connected fans to members of the Marseille football team while in the player tunnel of the Orange Velodrome minutes before a match!

In 2021, a long year and a half into the pandemic, la Vitre attended VivaTech for the first time. For the IT startup, the event would be a place to meet with people: to meet new customers, talk to existing clients about new features, and also meet other startups.

“Because our solution has so many applications, we work with so many people – we’re an ecosystem,” said co-founder Romuald. “VivaTech is an amazing event and so vast that we can actually meet a lot of the players from so many different sectors in the same place. And it’s a place where our ecosystem can expand too!”

And expand they did. During the 2021 edition, la Vitre met another startup, Fosfor, who had a similar solution, a human-sized screen, called the Crystalbox. Their screen allows content to be projected in 3D and is mostly used for pre-recorded videos for retail or events, unlike la Vitre’s real-time chatting solution.

“We thought, why not put the two together? So we worked on that. We started the collaboration last March. We took our solution, la Vitre, and instead of putting it on a 2D screen, we put it in their holographic box. Now we can have live exchanges with the capacity of la Vitre, but you can see people in 3D,” Romuald elaborated.