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Explained: What's Horizon Workrooms, Facebook's first launch under metaverse?

The social media giant launched VR workplace, the future of remote working

metaverse-facebook-workplace A representational image of a VR workplace shared on Oculus website. Facebook has been already using Horizon Workrooms internally for its meetings

During an earnings call in July, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg waxed eloquent about metaverse, its ambitious new initiative. “In addition to being the next generation of the Internet, the metaverse is also going to be the next chapter for us as a company. And in coming years, I expect people will transition from seeing us primarily as a social media company to seeing us as a metaverse company," he had said. 

He simply made it clear that the future of the company would go far beyond its current project of building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to support them. To be clear, Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse. Coined in Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel, metaverse refers to a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space. 

Close on the heels with its announcements on metaverse, Facebook launched the open beta of Horizon Workrooms, the future of work from home and remote working, on Thursday. Horizon Workrooms is a VR workplace. 

In plain language, Horizon Workrooms is Facebook's first major step toward Zuckerberg’s imagined metaverse, an all-encompassing alternate reality that blends the real world with digital imaginations and enhancements.

Horizon Workrooms is a virtual reality (VR) application for remote collaboration. Think of it as a 3-D virtual office you can access with an Oculus VR headset. The platform is based on the Horizon platform, which is still in very limited invitation-only beta testing. 

The basic concept is that instead of video-conferencing with a webcam, participants use virtual reality gear – like Facebook’s own Oculus Quest 2 – to meet up in a VR workspace. Spatial audio processing renders your colleagues’ voices closer or farther away depending on how close you’re “seated” to one another in virtual space. It is made up of several components that replicate activities you would do in an actual office and allows for multiple participants to join via VR or video

There’s also the usual VR added immersion factor. Workrooms supports the usual teleconference features – whiteboards, screen-sharing, chat, in addition to virtual desks. “Workrooms will not use your work conversations and materials to inform ads on Facebook,” the company says, and it also makes an effort to limit how much data leaves your office or home office in the first place.

Another feature Workrooms offers is a layered, mixed reality that incorporates “pass through” video from the Quest 2’s sensors; participants can choose to look “through” the VR headset to see a grainy, grayscale image of what’s in the real world with them. 

Facebook promises neither it nor third-party apps will be allowed to access, view, or use images and videos from your real-world environment to target ads. For those who don’t have their VR gear handy – or don’t want to use it – you can call into Workrooms with a standard webcam and microphone and show up on a virtual television screen within the workspace. Workrooms support up to 50 people on a call, 16 of whom can be in full VR.

"Using features like mixed-reality desk and keyboard tracking, hand tracking, remote desktop streaming, video conferencing integration, spatial audio, and the new Oculus Avatars, we’ve created a different kind of productivity experience," the company said in a blog on Oculus. 

It added that Facebook has been already using Horizon Workrooms internally for its meetings. 

Horizon Workrooms signifies the evolution of VR as a collaboration tool in the workplace and becoming a vital part of communications technology. Additionally, a beta version of Workrooms was made available for download in the Oculus store.

Facebook’s strategy around VR and AR is not just about consumer products but embraces the concept of the metaverse as somewhere we both play and work.