Facebook moves into virtual office space with Horizon Workrooms
The beta of Horizon Workrooms is out now and as far as I can tell available to the general public. It’s a VR/non-VR meeting space similar to what I’ve seen in Immersed and the like in my week or in the Oculus Quest. You can meet in a variety of ways, VR Googles, from a computer, probably via courier.
What I’ve had the ability to play with so far consists mostly of it knowing where my physical desk is and not visually recognizing my keyboard (a logitech wireless of some sort).
Without others to test this with my time has been spent mostly trying to figure out why my keyboard lacks the J&F nubbins that enable me to touch type without seeing the keyboard, and mostly marveling that I go from a 55″ screen in real life to a maybe 28″ screen in the virtual world which is… not great for my uses but might be configurable somewhere.
The lack of multi-screen in the VR also feels like a missed opportunity. I don’t know of anyone these days who operates on one screen. Eh, it’s a beta.
Being a beta it has issues such as just simply stopping working, remote PC dropping, some odd choices in hand tracking, fewer configuration options that you might want in a full fledged product, but it works… mostly.
It’s … at least for me, not a great working-in environment (for that I’d take Immersed and multi-desktop + phone,) but does appear to be set to be a a decent meeting and presentation space. Which not having any friends and my mom dressing me funny means I have not had a chance to play with the collaborative and presentation side.
If you want to test it / join the Pocketables workgroup hit me up, entirely not sure how invites / open meetings / etc work but will be investigating when I get back from work.
Facebook: now people live streaming on Facebook for several hours <link 1, 2> claiming to have a bomb outside the US Capitol Building can do it in VR with a whiteboard.
