The working environment of Korean office workers changes?

Come in if you want to work comfortably and freely! Naver and SK

left @naver <> right @SKT

Employees of SK and Naver, Korea's leading new generation conglomerates, will be very happy. It is because of the autonomous type of work paid to them, the new building, and the perfect high-tech work place of the shared office. I'm thinking about working there sometime. T^T

Below, I would like to introduce Naver's first robot-friendly building in the world and SK's shared office, which is the form of autonomous work. Come and watch, everyone!

NAVER's new building

Wow, NAVER employees work in this kind of place!

Naver unveiled its second office building, "1784." Built under the concept of a "Tech Convergence Building," 1784 has a total of 36 floors (eight underground and 28 above ground), with 25 elevators.

pic = @naver

1784 itself is a huge "technology platform" and test bed, and at the same time, it is Naver's work space, and it combines all of Naver's prior technologies researched and accumulated by Naver, such as robots, autonomous driving, AI, and cloud.

World's First Robot-Friendly Building

Earlier, 1784 was certified as the world's first robot-friendly building by the Smart City Association. The most noticeable high-tech technology in the office building is also 'robot'.

The robot "Rookie," produced by Naver Labs based on the autonomous robot platform AROUND, provides delivery services throughout the office building. At in-house restaurants, executives and employees receive and bring lunch boxes ordered through Naver Works, or deliver coffee from cafes to conference rooms.

left @Rookie<> right @M2

The indoor mapping robot M2 produces all 1784 of digital twin data so that Rookie can move well. This data is reflected in the positioning and path setting of robots through Naver Labs' positioning technology 'Visualization'.

1784 My robot has no self-control system. It is controlled by ARC (AI·ROBOT·CLOUD), a cloud-based multi-robot intelligence system linked to building infrastructure. There are many robots, but the 'brain' is one.

Arc efficiently controls numerous robots and updates data and algorithms from time to time using Arc Brain, which is responsible for controlling robots and infrastructure, and Arc Eye, which is responsible for positioning and moving robots.

In 1784, you can also see robot-specific infrastructure, and ROBOPORT, the world's first robot-only elevator, is representative. Roboport has a circular structure that runs from the second basement floor to the rooftop, maximizing the vertical speed and efficiency of robots.

In line with the concept of a test bed, various robot experiments continue in 1784.

Ambidex, a two-arm robot, disinfects a robot rookie that has completed delivery at a cafe in 1784, and Artowon, a drawing robot that Naver Labs is studying, learns a person's brush touch and performs a test of drawing on a pad. It is to test the vision and force control technology for robots to interact with people in daily life.

pic = @Ambidex

In addition, new interesting experiments continue to be released. Within 1784, robots that look like IPX's representative characters "Brown" and "Sally" are also active, and these robots were developed for research under the theme of "Study on the Interaction between Robots and Humans Using Familiar Characters" and are one of Naver Labs' human-robot interaction research projects.

Naver said, "The fact that 1784 is a robot-friendly building is also a big strength in robot prior research," adding, "Naver service personnel are also expected to introduce advanced technologies and services in a larger robot laboratory than anywhere else in the world."

Voice recognition. Minutes...If you're sick, treat it at the clinic

Facilities for the convenience and health of executives and employees are also diverse.

The AI conference room, which is scheduled to be introduced within 1784, is linked to Clova's service Clova Note, which converts recorded content into text. At the end of the meeting, the minutes organized in clovanotes can be shared to all participants.

pic = @naver

Employees can control various building infrastructure of 1784 or utilize various convenience functions in the building through Naver Works, and if they reserve a meeting room, they can directly control the temperature, lighting, louver, and ventilation of the meeting room, and check the waiting status of menus at in-house cafes and restaurants through AI chatbot.

At the affiliated clinic in the office building, medical staff with specialist qualifications treat executives and employees in rehabilitation medicine, family medicine, otolaryngology, urology, health examination counseling, and internal medicine.

Clova Healthcare Technology is applied to the clinic, and it also categorizes, organizes, analyzes, and recommends history management and appropriate checkups so that patients can automatically convert their examinations into medical terms with AI technology or see different types of past examinations through Clova OCR and AI summary functions.

SK's shared office

Feels like I'm working in an office…Better than working from home?

Do you know 'Spear', SK Telecom's hub office located on the 21st to 22nd floors of Sindorim D-Cube City in Seoul? The place, which was designed to allow people to work freely without having to go to work at the headquarters, was only two weeks old, but 19 out of 54 seats were filled.

The base office could be said to be a space where information technology is concentrated. At the office entrance, artificial intelligence (AI)-based face recognition technology was opened by determining whether it was an employee without a separate access card. For the convenience of employees, you can also reserve seats in advance through an application at home before going to work.

An official from SK Telecom said, "The window seat is the most popular, so reservations are filled quickly," adding, "So far, employees' usage rate is about two to three times a week." We use 60 to 70 percent of the space.

The house is a shrine, said an SK Telecom employee in charge of design work, whom I met at Spear. When I went to work at Sindorim, which is close to my home, I had half the time to go to work at the headquarters, he said. "I feel like I'm working in the office, so I can concentrate well and it's better than working from home." SK Telecom is headquartered in Euljiro, Seoul.

Non-face-to-face work that has become a daily routine...ICT Technology Concentration

When I entered the office, I saw a work space equipped with Oculus Quest so that I could work in virtual reality (VR) with employees far away. In the multi-person conference room, the camera recognized the people who entered one by one. If there are many people, it is set to a wide angle to show the whole thing, and if there is a presenter, only that person is on the camera.

pic = @SKT

The most notable place in the base office was iDesk. When the face was recognized on the tablet PC on the desk, a personal virtual desktop environment was immediately established. It has moved its business environment that has been established on its headquarters PC by utilizing its cloud PC system 'MyDesk'.

In line with the non-face-to-face era, Microsoft 365's messenger "Teams" was used for collaboration, and Midas and SK Telecom's metaverse platform "Efriend" were used as non-face-to-face meeting platforms.

I also cared about security. SK Telecom has linked QKD (Quantum Encryption Key Distributor) for the first time in Korea to VPN (Virtual Private Network), which is used independently by individual businesses. The quantum encryption key distributor is a security technology that transmits information to quantum whose status changes even with fine stimuli, and when a third party tries to steal it, the information contained in both changes and prevents it.

In the online environment, security was strengthened by utilizing Fast Identity Online (FIDO) based on biometric recognition, and data leakage was blocked by integrating it into the internal network of the company and going through authentication.

SK Telecom has started base offices in earnest since 2020 when COVID-19 spread. While the base office in 2020 was a place to work for a while, the current spire has been raised to the level of replacing the main office.

It's a strongholds attention.Apple and Google aren't coming to the company either

Not only SK Telecom but also global IT companies seem to be introducing base offices in line with flexible and flexible working systems. Base Office is evaluated to have compensated for the shortcomings of telecommuting, which is not easy to establish a work environment. The advantage is that you can reduce commuting time by going to work at a base close to your home, and increase your work capabilities without being wary of your boss.

Apple plans to introduce a plan to work remotely for up to four weeks a year based on three days a week. Google has also set a direction to permanently work from home and adjust workplaces based on the basic principle of going to work three days a week from April.

In Korea, Samsung Electronics is known to introduce a base office, and LG Electronics is also partially implementing a "remote walk" that allows employees to work freely in spaces outside the company. Since last year, KT has also applied a "digital work" culture that provides free private sharing offices to executives and employees to three places, Yeouido, Songpa, and Ilsan.