Facebook has launched a VR remote work app
Courtesy: Facebook
where users can hold meetings as avatars of themselves
CEO Mark Zuckerberg {arrow}
The beta test of the Horizon Workrooms app
comes as many companies continue to work from home
(Run this SOT alongside the above captions)
"The idea is like you go in, wherever you are, you have your perfect set up, you can have all your different monitors, people can stop in and collaborate quickly and it's really great for focussed work. And that will get better over time. The second area is about collaboration which is what this is focussed on, which is the notion that shouldn't physically have to be together to feel present or brainstorm.// What we're trying to move toward is a world where a lot of what we do is in here and the people who can't be in here can be on video and so people can feel present that way if people aren't together in person physically. So we're focussed on this, we think it's going to be a big use case for VR.''
The app is free but requires a $300 Oculus Quest 2 headset
It allows up to 16 people together in VR
and up to 50 in total including video conference participants
Facebook sees the app's launch as an early step
toward building a futuristic 'metaverse'
that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has described as an 'embodied internet'
(Andrew "Boz" Bosworth): "I think anybody who's doing something collaborative, this is a pretty useful tool. They're gonna have VR headsets so for a while it will be a lot of joint hybrid things. But I do think for people in who are in small groups and who are able to, this is kind of a neat space that before we built it didn't exist. There wasn't anything like this beforehand.''
