If after more than a year of remote meetings, imposed by the pandemic, you are convinced that software like Zoom are excellent tools, Facebook seems to have a different idea. From Menlo Park, in fact, they have launched a virtual reality app that makes you and your colleagues feel as if you are sitting around a table during a meeting in the office.
It’s called Horizon Workrooms, a free application for Oculus Quest 2 users. And it’s a fairly ambitious effort that aims to exploit the full potential of virtual reality even in areas other than entertainment and games.
How does it work
Workrooms allows up to 16 users (equipped with the Oculus headset) to meet in a virtual conference room, each represented by a customizable cartoon-like avatar that appears half-length and floats slightly above a virtual chair at a table. The app supports up to 50 attendees in a single meeting, with the rest able to join as video calls that appear in a grid-like flat screen within the virtual meeting room.
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Meeting attendees wearing headsets can use their real fingers and hands to gesticulate in virtual reality, and their avatar’s mouths appear to move realistically as they speak. A virtual whiteboard allows people to share pictures or give presentations.
“The pandemic in the past 18 months has only given us more confidence in the importance of this technology,” said Andrew Bosworth, VP of Facebook Reality Labs, addressing a (virtual) room of about a dozen people. Bosworth also revealed that Facebook has been using the app internally for about a year.
Facebook and Zuck’s metaverse
In recent weeks, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other big names in the tech sector have spoken with growing interest in the “metaverse”. The term is inspired by a dystopian science fiction idea for a virtual world that provides an escape from the reality of everyday life. And although the origins are not exactly positive, the viewers of the tech industry speak of it with optimism, with Facebook going to the point of creating a “group of Metaverse products”.