Two statements are both true, even if they seem at-odds with each other: remote and hybrid work are often preferred by employees, and sitting in remote meetings can get tiring. This is why businesses are investing in technology to improve the remote work and collaboration experience—particularly virtual reality (VR).
VR helps replicate the dynamics of in-person conversations and group meetings with one big difference: no one needs to be in the same physical location. This has helped make VR an important and growing technology in the communications space.
(In fact, the fifth annual XR Industry Insider Survey found that 95 percent of organizations plan to increase their investments in immersive technology like virtual reality, as part of their remote collaboration and training efforts.)
One big player in the VR space is Meta (formerly Facebook) and their Metaverse, including their VR offering for business communication and collaboration: Horizon Workrooms.
Horizon Workrooms Defined
Horizon Workrooms is a collaboration platform that uses virtual spaces for meetings and activities. This primarily uses virtual reality, although it can also be accessed through a web browser, and is designed to be the primary destination for all kinds of work and collaboration within the Metaverse.
Horizon Workrooms includes VR workstations, whiteboards, and chat with virtual replicas of office tools, and includes features like file sharing and integrations with calendar apps. Participants can also join in from their VR headset or dial in on their video conferencing app to join remote meetings in the workroom.
In other words: it’s a virtual version of conference rooms and office lounges in the Metaverse, complete with collaboration tools to make working remotely look and feel more like working together in person.
Users have avatars to provide a physical presence and can reflect complex facial expressions, they can port their keyboards in to type directly within the workroom and can use their VR headset’s controllers for motion tracking.
Work in the Metaverse
Horizon Workrooms first launched in August 2021, as organizations worldwide continued their adoption of remote and hybrid work. Earlier, in July, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined his plans for the Metaverse, along with an open beta of Horizon Workrooms.
Horizon Workrooms is designed to bring high-touch capabilities to remote work, made possible with the handheld controls for VR headsets. Users can make gestures, draw on virtual whiteboards, and interact with objects through the controls, and their movements are tracked in the VR landscape—or they can use their hands and have the Quest series headset’s cameras capture their movements.
Horizon Workrooms works on the Oculus Quest 2 headsets (now called Meta Quest), although users can also join meetings through the web. Horizon Workrooms will also enable interoperability with third-party apps in VR—conceivably even to the point of bringing an entire unified communications landscape into the Metaverse.
Communications Features in Horizon Workrooms
In order for Horizon Workrooms to successfully bring unified communications and collaboration into the Metaverse, it needs to include key communication capabilities that employees use in their daily apps. Beyond that, it needs to include features that can’t be found outside the Metaverse, or at least not outside of virtual reality.
According to Meta, Horizon Workrooms has these key capabilities for employees to meet, collaborate, and communicate in VR:
- Customizable workspaces that can be decorated and redesigned, including logos, posters, background scenery, and so on. Users can also create multiple rooms for different purposes. However, they can’t change the core layout, so design features like furniture arrangement will remain unchanged.
- Virtual whiteboards in every room with a practically infinite amount of space. Users can write and draw on the whiteboards using their controllers, or project images from their PC to the board. Users can also add sticky notes or images and share the whiteboard outside of VR. Whiteboard images are persistent, so users don’t have to worry about losing what they wrote.
- With the Oculus Remote Desktop app, users can create a VR workstation replica, streaming their desktop images and controlling their peripherals from a VR environment. Workroom currently supports five trackable keyboard variants, which can be used to type both in and out of the Metaverse. All edits made within Workrooms will be accessible from outside VR as well.
- Users can create customizable avatars to represent themselves in the Metaverse. The company boasts “a quintillion combinations” of design options to help users create avatars that look as close to them as possible.
- Low-latency spatial audio to create an immersive experience, where sounds come from a natural direction based on where the user is located in the workroom.
- Productivity capabilities such as integrations with Outlook and Google Calendar, as well as a persistent address for notes, file sharing, chats, and so forth, both during and after meetings.
- Hand-based navigation from the Quest and Quest 2 headsets’ inside-out cameras, which can capture hands and fingers for input, rather than the controllers.
- Multi-device compatibility so that users can join in Workrooms through VR, video calls, or by joining a meeting link (as not everyone has their own VR headsets).
- The Meta Quest Remote Desktop app lets users bring their computer screens into VR, so they can take notes and share content both in and out of the virtual space.
- Multiple screens in the VR workroom can mirror physical monitors or add virtual screens (although the latter is currently only available on macOS).
- Mixed reality (MR) passthrough uses cameras to display physical environments in the VR room, so users can still interact with the real world around them as needed.
Horizon Workrooms is available through Meta and will use a Workrooms account separate from Oculus and Facebook accounts to protect employee privacy. As the Metaverse continues to develop and gain shape, we can expect to see changes coming to Horizon Workrooms, such as greater customization, more third-party interoperability, and increased room sizes to allow for more users at once.
