Facebook presents VR app for collaboration
Horizon Workrooms is Facebook’s latest foray into virtual reality and metaverse. The company has now published its first insights.
At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg had his colleague: inside his Vision of Facebook’s future, of the future in general. And that lies in the virtual space. Now there are first impressions.
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In Horizon Workrooms, people can work together in virtual space
Horizon workrooms is the name of Facebook’s app, which is supposed to enable collaboration in teams in virtual space. The project is currently in an invite-only beta for the Oculus Quest 2 VR glasses. Techcrunch and The Verge could already test the application. Users come together via avatars in the virtual office, interact with each other via speech and chat as well as gestures and facial expressions. By connecting your PC or Mac to Horizon Workrooms, you can share your desktop and files with colleagues and work together on a virtual whiteboard. Virtual images of your own computer can also be taken into the workroom in order to work on it there.
Horizon Workrooms enables teams to work together in the virtual world. (Image: Facebook)
Up to 16 people can come together in a Horizon workroom; another 34 can join in via a video call. According to The Verge, the beta status is still clearly noticeable – glitches in picture and sound occur regularly and Mark Zuckerberg had to leave the virtual room once during the presentation and re-enter it because the mouth of his avatar no longer moved while speaking. But the spatial audio features should work well.
Zuckerberg states that Horizon Workrooms has been used internally on Facebook for six months. “I think it’s a much richer form of interaction when you really feel like you are with others than when you use the social apps we built for phones or computers,” he said.
Under the umbrella term Horizon, Facebook has been working on its version of a metaverse for a long time. The idea behind it is of course older and goes back to the science fiction author Neal Stephenson under the name Metaverse or Metaversum. This is a collective virtual space that is created through the connection of virtually expandable reality and physically manifesting virtual space. The metaverse is supposed to be the next iteration of the internet, in which shared, virtual 3D spaces are connected to form a large universe.
So far, virtual reality applications have often suffered from the fact that their meaning and purpose has only been revealed to very few users – which is why it takes a lot of effort to buckle into VR gear to hit virtual golf balls when it is also possible on the game console and the experience is similar is? Stroking virtual animals is also less fun than scratching a real cat. And with regard to social VR applications, the problem that often arises is that too few people have the appropriate equipment. For a metaverse that scales, what you need above all is sensible VR applications whose added value can be accessed quickly.
