Facebook has opened the test phase of a new app to everyone do in the virtual world what we can no longer do in the real world, or at least we can do much less: work in a team. Through virtual reality and the Oculus Quest 2 viewers (also produced by Facebook), people will be able to attend meetings together, without physically being together.
The open beta of Horizon Workrooms (this is the name of the new app), whose development was probably accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, which forced many companies to resort to smart working, for Mark Zuckerberg’s company it is above all the first step towards construction of the Metaverse (what’s this?), which the CEO himself has spoken about several times in recent weeks. After all, Facebook has invested heavily in virtual and augmented reality, developing hardware such as Oculus Vr viewers, working on Ar glasses and other technologies and purchasing some virtual reality video game development studios, such as BigBox Vr.
To arrive before the others in this space, which according to many will be the next big news from the tech world, would allow Facebook to have an important advantage over the competition: Andrew Bosworth, vice president of the Reality Labs group inside the Menlo Park company, told some reporters (obviously during a virtual reality press conference) that Workrooms “gives a sense” of how Facebook imagines the Metaverse and that “this is one of the fundamental steps in that direction”.
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The Metaverse, a cyberpunk invention
The word “metaverse” was first used since American writer Neal Stephenson in the novel Snow Crash, written in 1992 and by now practically impossible to find in Italy (but there is a recent anthology that contains it, it is entitled Cyberpunk – Absolute Anthology): it is usually used to describe immersive and shared spaces accessible through different platforms in which the physical and digital worlds converge.
Zuckerberg described the Metaverse as “the Internet in flesh and blood” and many other CEOs have talked about the same topic, such as Satya Nadella (Microsoft), David Baszucki (Roblox Corp, video games) and Shar Dubey (Match Group, dating), according to which this environment halfway between the virtual and the real could also change the future of their companies.
Returning to Workrooms, users will be able to create avatars of themselves to meet in virtual conference rooms and collaborate on whiteboards or shared documents, interacting physically with what is on their desk at the same time and with the computer keyboard; the app, which you can already download for free if you have a Quest 2 viewer, allows the connection of up to 16 people at the same time in the same VR room and up to 50 in total in videoconferencing.
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Facebook has already made it known that will not use the conversations and information that people will exchange in Workrooms on their work for profile them for advertising purposes and also that users will have to abide by the rules established for VR communities.
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