With Horizon Workrooms, Facebook is putting forward a new app for meeting in virtual reality. Immediately a first look at what the metaverse could look like at Facebook.
While you are preparing for your next Zoom meeting or finishing a presentation that you will soon release on your colleagues via WebEx or Teams, Facebook is further preparing for the virtual reality era. Or at least that’s the future the tech giant believes in.
In 2014, Facebook paid $2 billion to acquire VR headset manufacturer Oculus. This now results in a new virtual reality app that is intended explicitly for remote working. The company’s Oculus Quest 2 headsets allow users to join meetings as an avatar version of themselves. Horizon Workrooms is the app’s name that is now being released to the general working public in an ‘open beta’ and under the slogan ‘Remote collaboration reimagined’.
The test of the Horizon Workrooms app from Oculus/Facebook comes at a time when many (American) companies decide to let staff work from home permanently. As a result of the corona pandemic, hardly any work was done in the office. The virus is also escalating in many places, often delaying decisions to work in the office. The app allows up to sixteen people to be together in VR and up to fifty in total for video meeting participants.
The world’s largest social network has already invested heavily in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in recent years and brought in other VR and AR-related expertise in addition to Oculus. AR mixes the real world with the virtual world. The company developed various hardware such as its Oculus VR headsets. Time and money were also spent on developing AR glasses and technologies for smartwatches.