philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Facebook Releases Blockbuster App For Remote Work

This morning Facebook launched Horizon Workrooms, a free cross platform XR (VR, PC) collaboration app that enables distributed teams or groups to share a private virtual room for meetings, training and education. Workrooms can accommodate up to sixteen avatars, representing sixteen people in Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets, and as many as fifty people on video, using the companion Oculus remote desktop PC app, which provides a Zoom-like interface for colleagues on PCs in the physical world. There are white boards, shared note pads, and options for multiple environments that change in size based on the number of participants in VR. The rooms are persistent and content created there can be taken back onto the PC. Users can upload documents, photos, videos, basically any file on their computer into the room. You can even screen share.

... You can see your computer through the outward facing cameras of the Quest 2 headset well enough to type notes on a real computer while in VR...

“Workrooms is our first experience designed from the ground up using hands as your primary form of input instead of controllers,” began LeBeau. ... They’re more natural, more expressive, and quite good for using other tools like whiteboards and computers, making it more like a place you want to do work.” ...

"... It works for people in 2D and in headsets.” Boz later elaborated. ... A metaverse describes a persistent digital place that can be accessed by all sorts of devices. It only really becomes a metaverse when it crosses platform boundaries.” ...

I keep up with the leading state-of-the-art cross-platform virtual collaboration platforms like Spatial.io, Altspace, Engage, Glue, Arthur, and Virbela, which all seem to be growing quickly. They offer all the features Horizon Workrooms has and more. ... the incumbent platforms have some important features that Workrooms doesn’t yet have. The interface Spatial, Engage, and Altspace, with VR world-building platform Unity, don’t exist on Workrooms. ,...

Workrooms is clearly still in beta, but it’s a beta of one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in VR. It just doesn’t happen to be working perfectly right now. My keyboard disappeared intermittently. Sometimes the hands occluded the keyboard and confused the computer vision. ...

See the full story here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2021/08/19/facebook-releases-blockbuster-app-for-remote-work/?sh=493a1a7c52fd&fbclid=IwAR3C9zQg2RsvXfIaw7Wgo5jI_-4Vuc5W9kj0ug7DvJsgE58_FnglIJBb47c