Do you miss the in-person office experience? Enough to strap on a VR headset and sit around a virtual meeting room? That's the future Mark Zuckerberg is proposing with Horizon Workrooms.
Horizon "works across both virtual reality and the web and is designed to improve your team’s ability to collaborate, communicate, and connect remotely, through the power of VR—whether that’s getting together to brainstorm or whiteboard an idea, work on a document, hear updates from your team, hang out and socialize, or simply have better conversations that flow more naturally," Facebook says.
The feature is launching today in beta and works with the Oculus Quest 2. Those who don't have room in their home office for a VR headset can dial into a Horizon Workroom from a computer or video call. "Video participants will show up on a video screen in the virtual room, just like a real conference room," Facebook says.
A Workroom can fit up to 16 people in VR and up to 50 people in total. Those in VR will show up as Oculus Avatars, and participants can tap into a new Oculus Remote Desktop companion app for Mac and Windows to access their computer and peripherals during a meeting to take notes, share screens, and all other exciting things work meetings usual entail.
With a Workroom, that includes getting expressive. "Workrooms is one of our first experiences that was designed from the start to use your hands, and not controllers, as your primary input," Facebook says. "This helps to create a more natural and expressive social experience and lets you switch more easily between physical tools like your keyboard and controllers when needed."
If you have an Oculus controller, you can flip it around and write with it like a pen on a digital whiteboard, from the "physical desk in front of you or standing with others at the whiteboard."
Sign up to test it at oculus.com/workrooms. You'll need to create a Workrooms account that's separate from your Oculus or Facebook accounts, "although your Oculus username may be visible to other users in some cases," Facebook says.
People can't peek over your shoulder to look at your computer screen in a Workfroom as they might during an IRL meeting, unless you share it yourself. Facebook says it will not use the content of your meetings to serve up targeted ads.
"We think VR will fundamentally transform the way we work as a new computing platform, defying distance to help people collaborate better from anywhere," Facebook writes.
This comes several weeks after Zuckberg talked up the metaverse, a virtual state of being in which people go about their usual lives, but in avatar form—to create the “feeling that you're really there with another person or in another place,” according to Zuckerberg, who envisions the metaverse a "the next generation of the internet."
It's also rolling out shortly after Facebook pushed its return-to-work date into 2022 amid the COVID-19 Delta variant surge.