Business Post Contributor
By Sodeinde Temidayo David
Facebook has launched a new virtual reality app that allows remote workers to exist as avatars and collaborate in the same virtual space.
Last week, the social media giant carried out a beta test of its Horizon Workrooms app on the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset.
The Chief Executive (CEO) of Facebook Incorporated, Mr Mark Zuckerberg, revealed that the beta test of Facebook’s Horizon Workroom app comes as many companies continue to work from home after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down physical workspaces and as a new variant is sweeping across the globe.
“We shouldn’t really have to physically be together to feel present, collaborate or brainstorm,
“Video conferencing has taken us pretty far, but as we start planning to go back into the office, I’m not super excited about having most meetings be over video,” he said.
The world’s largest social network has invested heavily in virtual and augmented reality, developing hardware such as its Oculus VR headsets, working on AR glasses and wristband technologies, and buying a bevvy of VR gaming studios, including BigBox VR.
In the VR test, Facebook showed how users can design avatar versions of themselves and can collaborate on shared documents and whiteboards in virtual conference rooms while using their own physical desks and computer keyboards at home.
Also, users can pin images from their computer on the whiteboard and then mark them up and review them with colleagues.
Oculus stated on its website that Workrooms was designed so that users can use their hands, which it says helps to create a more natural and expressive social experience and lets one switch more easily between physical tools like keyboard and controllers.
The app allows up to 16 people to meet in virtual reality and up to 50 total including video conference participants. The app is free but only through Facebook’s Quest 2 headsets which cost over N120,000.
The company said it would not use people’s work conversations and materials in Workrooms to target ads on Facebook.
Also commenting on the launch, the vice president of Reality Labs group at Facebook, Mr Andrew Boz Bosworth, said the new Workrooms app gives a good sense of how the company envisions elements of the metaverse.
“Facebook is now using Workrooms regularly for internal meetings, Mark’s ‘metaverse’ dream.
“Facebook sees its latest launch as an early step toward building the futuristic metaverse that Mr Zuckerberg has touted in the last few weeks,” he disclosed.
The metaverse, short for meta-universe, is a digital world where the real and virtual merge into a vision of science fiction and allows people to move between different devices and communicate in a virtual environment.
