Look, we’re as fatigued by Zoom calls and Teams meetings as much as the next person but if you asked us if we’d prefer to have a VR headset stuck to our face eight hours a day, we’d take a lifetime of Zoom calls instead.
Facebook, however, believes that this is the future of work and has launched Horizon Workrooms for the Oculus Quest 2.
What is Horizon Workrooms?
“Workrooms is our flagship collaboration experience that lets people come together to work in the same virtual room, regardless of physical distance. It works across both virtual reality and the web and is designed to improve your team’s ability to collaborate, communicate, and connect remotely, through the power of VR— whether that’s getting together to brainstorm or whiteboard an idea, work on a document, hear updates from your team, hang out and socialize, or simply have better conversations that flow more naturally,” explains Facebook.
Alternatively, the solution can be summed up as: making everybody a Wii avatar and translating them and your workspace into a VR space.
Facebook says that it will blend the real world with virtual reality to create a mixed reality experience. Users will be able to access compatible peripherals which are tracked into virtual reality so that they can continue typing and answering emails. The firm adds that, with the Oculus Remote Desktop app, users will be able to access their computer from within VR.
Once again we need to reiterate, that this is all done with a 503g weight strapped to your face with displays right in front of your eyes.
The social network goes on to say that it won’t use conversations and materials within Workrooms to inform advertising on Facebook. Users and entire Workrooms can also be banned if a user feels they are not following Facebook’s policies.
But we have to wonder who is going to implement Workrooms. Considering the cost of the Quest 2 (we see prices starting at R9 799 locally) as well as the hardware needed to drive the headset, we suspect multinational enterprises might find this appealing, if they have deep enough pockets.
We can say that this is a cool idea in an age of remote working but it all just feels so odd. Facebook says that working alone can feel isolating at times and we agree. We don’t think that bringing everybody into a virtual room to work is a solution to that, however, especially when -once again – they are doing it with 503g of weight strapped to their face.
We know we’ve harped on about this but considering how long a work day is and the fatigue we’ve experienced using VR for 30 minutes at a time, we don’t see Workroom taking off in any meaningful capacity.
Well, at least not beyond Mark Zuckerberg’s office.
