Facebook Wants Your Workplace to Be in Virtual Reality

This week, Facebook announced Horizon Workrooms, a free app for its Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality headset that marks the company’s latest attempts to bring the modern workplace into the virtual world.

VentureBeat reports that Facebook has launched the open beta for its new Horizon Workrooms app for its Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality headset this week. The software is designed to operate as a virtual workplace, allowing colleagues working remotely to wear headsets allowing them to see and interact with digital avatars of each other as if they were in the same room.

GRAEME JENNINGS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Horizon Workrooms allows users to make digital representations of themselves using its avatar creation system, then those avatars are placed in a 3D-animated virtual workspace where virtual meetings and conversations can take place. This appears to be one of the first steps in the creation of Facebook’s “Metaverse,” and while it isn’t yet at the level of sci-fi technology seen in novels like Ready Player One and Snow Crash, Facebook hopes to one day achieve the level of immersion described in those books.

While Horizon Workrooms is ideally experienced through an Oculus Quest 2 headset, users can also join workrooms via smartphones, desktops, or laptops and engage with their colleagues. Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the vice president of Facebook Reality Labs, commented in a press briefing: “You are actually in the demo. We’ve been talking about the future of work for a long time. It’s why we’re in AR/VR. The pandemic hitting in the last 18 months has given us greater confidence in this technology.”

Facebook’s director of FRL Work Experiences, Mike LeBeau, commented: “We have been looking towards our ambitions of this as a metaverse and the future of computing platforms. We think this is an inflection point for VR. This is the moment where we are adapting the medium for that end. We are evolving beyond a games thing to something where you can be productive for work. To make it work, we have brought together a lot of technologies that are needed for work. We are designing the paradigms that are needed for that new computing platform.”

It was recently reported that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with employees in June to announce an ambitious new initiative. Zuckerberg said that the future of Facebook would go far beyond its current aim of building a set of interconnected social apps with some hardware to support them; instead, Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences known as the “metaverse.”

But what exactly is the Metaverse? Facebook Reality Labs VP Andrew Bosworth attempted to clarify that in a recent Facebook post but still did not go into too much detail. Bosworth stated:

The Metaverse is already here as a collection of digital worlds each with its own physics to determine what’s possible within them. The defining quality of the metaverse will be presence — the feeling of really being there with people — and FRL has been focused on building products that deliver presence across digital spaces for years. Today Portal and Oculus can teleport you into a room with another person, regardless of physical distance, or to new virtual worlds and experiences. But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces — so you can remove the limitations of physics and move between them with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next.

COMMENTS