Some of today’s biggest tech news involves a surprise announcement by none other than Facebook unveiling a new virtual reality service that may develop into one of our common interfaces of the future.
Rachel Metz for CNN Business reports Facebook is calling this conference environment “Horizon Workrooms” and implementing it with an Oculus Quest 2 headset. Up to 16 people can participate in the virtual meeting where their bodies are represented in the headset as floating avatars.
No word yet on hard adoption figures, but a piece in The Verge written by someone participating in open beta for the tech tells more about what this process looks like:
“I was sitting at a long, U-shaped conference table with a handful of other reporters, our floating torsos bobbing over our chairs, as the Facebook CEO beamed in,” wrote Alex Heath. “A giant, floating display nearby showed other Facebook employees dialed in from the non-VR world to watch us through their computer screens. It was there that Zuckerberg first appeared through his webcam before donning a headset and teleporting into a chair at the table as his own legless avatar.”
Some looking at this new development warily suggest that Facebook was big and monolithic enough without pioneering a new videoconferencing technology.
However, one of the rules of the road in big tech is that big tech names tend to get the attention when rolling out these types of programs. Where Facebook Libra failed as a plan to develop an alternate currency, Horizon Workrooms may succeed as a more anodyne addition to Facebook’s empire. Reports suggest that despite the novelty of the announcement this morning, Facebook has been using the technology internally for the better part of a year. Will this catch on in the business world at large, finally making all of us into virtual congregants? We’ll see.
