Facebook Today Unveil Its vision for the future of work: a virtual reality experience called Horizon Workrooms, which uses avatars and VR headsets to replicate face-to-face collaboration.
The technology giant hopes to ride the wind and waves to promote the adoption of remote work and VR. Especially Facebook’s Oculus subsidiary And a Quest 2 headset worth $299.
Horizon Workrooms can work across virtual reality and the Web, and use digital whiteboard, hand tracking, spatial audio and other features to help colleagues work together, even if they are physically separated.other companies Including Microsoft A similar experience was announced recently.
Horizon Workrooms is now open to collaboration, aiming to make the team feel like they are together when they are separated. The tools we currently have serve people to a certain extent, but we have lost our creativity and ability to connect, and we believe that Workrooms can bridge this gap. pic.twitter.com/TOSyiinKOl
-Boz (@boztank) August 19, 2021
It is not clear whether Facebook’s new ideas will become popular. Thursday’s response ranged from “I like here” arrive”This looks like hell. “
But the leaders of Seattle startups said the news is good news for companies building related technologies.
“It further validates the potential of spatial computing for work and collaboration,” said Forest Gibson, Co-founder Pluto, A Seattle startup that develops mixed reality services. “This will encourage more people to experiment with virtual workspaces and consider using them as a key part of remote or hybrid teams.”
Gordon Hampton, CEO and co-founder point, Recently raised $1.7 million for its company’s software, which creates an office virtual image. He said that Horizon Studios is “definitely verifying.”
“It’s all part of the same story,” said Hempton, who helped found Seattle sales giant Outreach. “We have seen companies that really tend to work remotely realize that they need additional in-depth experience.”
Hempton said that Spot focuses on a more accessible virtual experience and does not require a VR headset. But he said that over time, “VR will become a progressive enhancement of Spot, and will eventually compete with products such as Horizon Workrooms.”
I have tried to combine virtual reality with work before. As early as 2014, a Seattle startup called Envelop launched a unique product that allowed employees to wear a headset and work in a virtual environment, use virtual Windows desktops and access unlimited displays in a 3D space.
But Envelop went bankrupt in 2017. Its CEO Bob Berry said the market is not big enough.
Berry said in 2017: “We just realized that our strategy, timing, and all of these may take two to three years to execute our grand strategy.” “For these types of venture-backed companies, you must be at the right time Right place. I think we came too early.”
After years of hype, virtual reality and augmented reality have not yet become mainstream, mainly due to expensive hardware and lack of use cases. But Oculus can lower the price of its Quest 2, which is a standalone device and does not require a PC connection.
IDC predicts that VR headset shipments in 2021 will increase by 28.9% year-on-year.
Facebook is clearly still using Workrooms and horizon It is a virtual playground in itself, similar to Rec Room, another VR company based in Seattle.
This is all part of the “meta universe” of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Described earlier this month As a “virtual environment in which you can appear with people in the digital space”.
It remains to be seen how this so-called “meta universe” will evolve and which companies will participate. Gibson pointed out that Facebook has not announced other support platforms for Workrooms, and it “seems to continue to focus on building its own closed Quest platform.”
“At Pluto, we believe in an open ecosystem where developers can create and publish multitasking applications on various hardware without app store approval, which is critical to the success of the next computing platform,” he Say.