Facebook has finally made a good virtual reality app – TechCrunch

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Facebook’s journey to make virtual reality a thing has been a long and tortuous one, but despite their mixed success in finding a large audience for virtual reality, they have managed to build some very nice hardware along the way. What’s ironic enough is that while Facebook has managed to perfect the hardware and operating system of its Oculus devices – things it has never done before – over the years it has struggled harder to create a good virtual reality app.

The company has released a number of VR social apps over the years, and while each of them have managed to do something right, none of them have done anything well enough to avoid a crash. Putting aside the fact that most VR users don’t have a ton of other friends who also own VR headsets, the larger problem plaguing these social apps is that they’ve never given users a great reason to use them. While watching 360-degree videos or playing board games with friends were interesting gimmicks, the company took a long time to realize that a dedicated social app doesn’t make much sense in VR and that users haven’t been looking for a standalone social app, as much as they sought engaging experiences that have been enhanced by social dynamics.

All of this brings me to what Facebook showed me a demo this week for a job app called Horizon Workrooms, which will launch in open beta for Quest 2 users starting today.

The app appears to be geared towards providing employees working from home with a virtual reality sphere in which to collaborate. Users can connect their Mac or PC to Workrooms and live stream their desktop to the app, while Quest 2’s passthrough cameras allow users to type on the physical keyboard. Users can chat with each other as avatars and share photos and files or draw on a virtual whiteboard. It is an app that would have had a more significant impact for the Quest 2 platform had it been launched at the start of the pandemic, although it is addressing a problem that still looms among tech-savvy bureaus: finding technology solutions to help meaningful collaboration in a remote environment.

Horizon Workrooms isn’t a social app per se, but the way it approaches social communication in VR is more thoughtful than any other first-party social VR app provided by Facebook. Spatial elements are less noticeable and gimmicky than most VR apps, and simply add to an already great functional experience that was sometimes more productive and engaging than a regular video call.

Image credits: Facebook

It all plays into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that Facebook is becoming a “metaverse company.”

Now, what is the metaverse? In Zuckerberg’s words, it’s a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces. You can think of this as an embodied internet that you are in rather than just staring at. This certainly sounds like a fairly significant recalibration for Facebook, which has generally approached AR / VR as a completely separate entity from its suite of mobile apps. Desktop users and VR users have effectively been isolated from each other over the years.

In general, Facebook scaled down Oculus as if it were building the next smartphone, building its headsets with a native app paradigm at its core. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg’s forward-thinking “metaverse” looks much more like what Roblox has built than anything Facebook has actually distributed. Horizon Workrooms lives under the Horizon brand, which seems to be where the future Facebook metaverse game is rooted. Interestingly, the VR social platform is still in closed beta after being announced nearly two years ago. If Facebook ever succeeds in realizing Horizons’ vision, it could grow to become a Roblox-like hub of user-created games, activities and groups that will replace the native app’s mobile dynamics with a smoother social experience.

Workrooms polish is certainly a promising sign of where Facebook might be moving.

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