Hands-on with Facebook Horizon Workrooms’ new VR for work app

[ad_1]

It wasn’t long since the last press conference I attended in virtual reality when Mark Zuckerberg showed up to talk about the metaverse.

I was seated at a long, U-shaped conference table with a handful of other reporters, our floating trunks swaying atop our chairs, as the Facebook CEO took off. A giant floating screen nearby showed other Facebook employees calling from a non-virtual reality world to watch us through their computer screens. It was there that Zuckerberg first appeared through his webcam before wearing a headset and teleporting to a chair at the table as his legless avatar.

We were there to preview a new app, which Facebook describes as an “open beta” of the Oculus Quest app called Horizon Workrooms. It’s the social network’s first attempt at creating a VR experience specifically for people to work together. After spending over an hour in Workroom, I can see its potential as a more inclusive way to connect with people who are physically separated, but I don’t. I’m not going to see her outrun the most die-hard VR fan anytime soon. However, I can see this experience becoming compelling for more casual users, perhaps those completely new to virtual reality, in the coming years.

reticle display

While it’s an incremental update to Facebook’s virtual reality efforts in and of itself, Workrooms fits in with the social network’s broader ambitions to own the next computing platform and build the so-called metaverse. Zuckerberg went so far as to say recently that he wants Facebook to be seen primarily as a metaverse — a sci-fi concept that says we will one day spend large chunks of time in a completely immersive digital space. Or, as Zuckerberg puts it, “the Internet embodied.”

What impressed me most about Workroom is the way it brings parts of the outside world into virtual reality. Up to 16 people can be in VR in the workroom together, while an additional 34 people can join via video call without wearing a headset. The companion desktop app lets you send a live feed of your computer screen across the virtual table space. Thanks to manual tracking of the front and front cameras, there is a virtual representation of the physical keyboard at the bottom of your screen for typing in Facebook’s barebones web app designed for taking notes and managing calendars.

“I think it might be the most powerful virtual reality app out there”

Andrew “Bose” Bosworth, Vice President of Reality Labs at Facebook

“I think it might be the most intense application in VR, in terms of how well we try to put every bell and whistle from a headset into the experience you’re using,” Andrew Bosworth, CEO of AR/VR, said during the briefing, which was the first of The kind that I fully experience in VR.

At the moment, the process of getting into the working rooms at first is very difficult. It oddly requires you to create a separate Workrooms account across the web, download Workrooms in Oculus, and then associate the headset with your Workrooms account by entering a code that appears in the headset on your PC’s web browser.

Some of the features in Workrooms, like a personal drawing board and a giant whiteboard that anyone can climb on and use, seem more artful than useful. There have been several times when the sound has cut off or become distorted, and the tracking of Quest’s hand wasn’t perfect. At one point, Zuckerberg had to leave and rejoin the room because his mouth wasn’t moving at all when he was talking. The desktop companion app is not yet compatible with the Apple M1 processor, so I haven’t been able to try it out on my MacBook Air 2020. (A Facebook representative told me that support will be available soon for Apple M1 devices.)

Even with the Quest’s relatively smaller graphics and bugs compared to my MacBook’s screen, I still feel more presence in workrooms than I normally do in a traditional video conferencing setup like Zoom. Original arm and hand tracking helped, right down to individual finger movements. The biggest factor is the Quest’s spatial sound. When someone spoke in one corner of the room, it seemed as if their voice was coming from that direction. At one point, the seating layout changed and I felt as if someone sitting behind me in VR was actually talking from behind my head.

“A richer way to interact than the kinds of social apps we’ve been able to create on phones or computers”

Facebook Workroom has been used internally for meetings for about six months, according to Zuckerberg. “These kinds of experiences, where you can actually feel present with other people, I think are a much richer way to interact than the kinds of social apps we’ve been able to build on phones or computers,” he said.

Mark Zuckerberg during a meeting in Horizon

Zuckerberg is right that virtual reality feels more immersive than a phone or computer screen. But workrooms — and the devices that power them — have ways to go before they are compelling enough to replace the current ways in which people work together and hang out at scale. But at the rate that Facebook’s Oculus hardware and software is advancing, I expect experiences like Workrooms to be more intuitive and enticing in a couple of years than they are now. Other upcoming entrants to the space, such as Apple, are likely to accelerate consumer interest in these types of headphones.

Workrooms are part of a larger canopy project that Facebook is building for Oculus called Horizon. Horizon, which it originally teased a couple of years ago, aims to be essentially the entire Facebook universe — the metaverse, you might say — of virtual reality. Workrooms will be a part of it, and in the past Facebook had demo games and world-building tools similar to Minecraft or Roblox.

Although he originally said Horizon will debut in 2020, the experience is still only in beta, and Facebook’s Bosworth refused to give me an exact time frame of when that would change. He said the company has focused on building more tools for creators, so they can in turn build things in Horizon for others.

This indicates that Facebook wants Horizon to be a platform for other developers to build on. Until the advent of Horizon, Workrooms is the best glimpse yet of what Facebook means when it says it builds meaning.

[ad_2]