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Horizon Workrooms: The Facebook metaverse begins with virtual reality encounters

It looks like Mark Zuckerberg for me, while this interview explains it differently than most of the job interviews that have taken place in the last 18 months. “You’re sitting to my right,” he says. “That means I’m on your left. We have a shared sense of space. ”And it’s true. A zoom call would be just a small square in an array, empty looking at a webcam. But here at Horizon Workrooms, Facebook’s new VR meeting space, it feels like we’re sitting feet away it’s mostly like the real one with Zuckerberg’s new avatar, from the caesarean section to the unblinking blue eyes.

There is a problem, however: the mouth does not move.

I can hear the voice of the CEO of Facebook, and I can see him moving his hands as he gestures, but the net effect is like a picture of Hummel explaining his vision of Metabers. I’ll put it this way: It’s not like that no amazing.

It is also easy enough to fix. Zuckerberg has left the conference room, will be out of sight, and will soon be reunited, with his virtual mouth fully operational and Uncanny Valley successfully bridged. “It’s really confusing when there’s not even a small piece,” admits Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, president of Facebook Reality Labs, sitting at a long, long table across the room.

Horizon Workrooms, which the company officially announced today, is also officially in beta. This means that problems do occur. Sometimes, Bosworth says, people come in completely blue. But all mouths aside (Bosworth calls it a well-known mistake), the platform slowly moved forward in this week’s demonstration. It may not be the first time a company has tried it create a compelling VR version of a meeting (no with a long shot), Workrooms is Facebook’s first public attempt to allow what Zuckerberg has called an “infinite office”. It turns out that Metaverse can be similar to Meetaverse.

A few months ago, WIRED reported Teams at Facebook Reality Labs held weekly meetings in a home-built VR app. That was Horizon Workrooms. Somehow, it didn’t come out of the closure caused by the pandemic. At least not completely. “Obviously, our enthusiasm has grown roughly in the last 18 months,” Bosworth says. A couple of years ago, the FRL team started looking at the problem of virtual work; Although tools like Zoom and Slack have made it possible to collaborate between distances, Bosworth noted that they don’t necessarily have to do much work for creativity.

That’s where Workrooms comes in. When you launch the app for the first time on your Oculus Quest 2 headset, it asks you to trace the front edge of the desktop with a hand controller, and then connect the headset to the computer; Once the setup is complete, you are seated at a virtual table of your own size, facing the front of your laptop screen. Are you using a MacBook Pro or a compatible Logitech keyboard? These are monitored, which means that the virtual drill sits at the table in front of you; As you reach out to type, you are drawn to Quest’s camera passage and you see your IRL hands overlapping on the keys. You can also ignore handheld controllers, as Quest 2’s hands-on tracking allows you to interact with workplaces with your pinch and finger. (You want to make sure there isn’t a whole cup of coffee around. Believe me.)

Horizon Workrooms allows users to type or doodle the Oculus Quest 2 driver like a pen, and display it on the whiteboard for everyone to see.

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