Facebook just changed the future of remote work

Today Mark Zuckerberg came out with an unexpected announcement in an interview with CBS, while it was not totally unexpected, it might come off as a surprise to many people. The product which Facebook announced is called Horizon workrooms. Here are my first impressions for the same.

Source: Facebook's press briefing about workrooms

What is workrooms?

Workrooms is a VR application (only available for Oculus Quest 2, as of writing this)that allows you to work remotely but unlike Zoom, the experience is 3D and gives you an experience which is pretty close to the one in a real office space (but with toon-like avatars, which are cool but might make it look a little unrealistic). The cool thing is that it allows you to bring stuff like your keyboard, laptop into virtual reality to work even while being in VR by scanning them. Which is something which competitors like Spatial don't offer at the moment, hence being an interesting advantage.

Other cool features

• It allows you to reverse your VR controller, so that it can be used as a marker

• Similar to real life, it has spatial audio, due to which you can hear the person from the direction where he/she/they are speaking from and not from just one side.

• You can easily customize your room as per your requirements, you can set it up into a conference mode like the image above or like a presentation (see below) or a class

Source: Facebook's press release

Apart from the above, the tool is also free to use and people who don't have a Quest 2 can also join in from their laptops (but only in a zoom like grid view where you can see others in 3D), provided the admin has a Quest 2 to set the workroom up.

What does this mean for you?

While the enthusiasm of Facebook and other companies for "Metaverse" has become growingly visible (it turns out that this was a long term project which they have been working on for years and not just because of the pandemic), we are not going to be living in the ready player one style oasis anytime soon but these steps do show that something amazing is coming up on the horizon but seeing that Facebook is currently not in the best position regarding privacy and misinformation a lot of questions about Facebook's metaverse still exist, so I would like to ask you about your thoughts on Facebook and workrooms, do you think it would work or is it a gimmick? Let us know your thoughts by tweeting @kinetechblog on twitter or by commenting below.

Learn more: Horizon workrooms press release- https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/introducing-horizon-workrooms-remote-collaboration-reimagined/ CBS Interview with Mark Zuckerberg- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frZQrEBVkkk

Verge's coverage on Workrooms- https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/19/22629942/facebook-workrooms-horizon-oculus-vr

Mark Zuckerberg on Metaverse- https://www.theverge.com/22588022/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-ceo-metaverse-interview?utm_source=pocket_mylist Cnet's coverage on workrooms - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHIrIPnX4G8