Jim "Babbage" Purbrick Brings His Second Life-Based Work Experience to Help Develop Facebook's Horizon Workrooms

Facebook's new Horizon Workroom, a Quest 2-based virtual space for companies and organizations (just announced today) is the latest major project that's an unacknowledged descendant of Second Life: One of its lead developers was Jim "Babbage" Purbrick, who brought his own experience as a remote worker for Linden Lab who used SL itself as a collaborative space to Workroom. 

"Very happy to see it out after lots of lobbying that VR for work shouldn't just be an aspirational future dream for Michael Abrash keynotes, but something that could be useful now," as Jim puts it to me now, who left Facebook last year. "Something I was convinced about because Second Life had already been useful for work, as discussed here." (Jim last featured on on New World Notes here.)

The Facebook project was actually started before the pandemic, and enables up to 16 Quest 2 users to be in the same virtual space, with 50 others able to join by video streaming. Despite Second Life being a seed of its inspiration, Jim tells me he's most psyched by its mixed reality features:

"The thing I was most excited about with Workrooms was the mapping of real world objects and surfaces in to the virtual world: because the virtual world contains objects you typically have in your real environment, you can have a desk or wall that you can share with others in the virtual world, but because it maps to a real surface in the real world you can lean on it or put a coffee on it without it falling to the floor and spilling on your shoes. It adds enormously to the experience and gives you perfect haptic feedback for free by reusing your physical space."

That does seem quite cool, though the focus on the Quest 2 will be a limiting factor -- as will its lack of fanciful graphics that make being in a virtual world so special in the first place. (As my friend Amber Case just noted.) But I suspect integrating real world elements with the fantastic should be feasible in future updates! 

Why do we keep making VR apps that replicate the work environment? It's VIRTUAL REALITY! You can make ANY environment you want! The universe is your oyster! But NO, we spend million trying to replicate the aesthetics of a Herman Miller chair and the beige walls of a stuffy room. https://t.co/B3ed57EKPg

— ✨ Amber Case ✨ (@caseorganic) August 19, 2021

Comments

[Pixeleen Mistral]

Why don’t the avatars have legs? Is that to make it harder for them to escape?

[bavid Dailey]

If you carefully read the comments on the Ars Technica story about this announcement, a worthy read, you will note that most commentators see the limiting factor to be that it is a Facebook product and essentially not trustworthy, with many noting that wearing a VR googles isn't appealing either.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/facebooks-metaverse-got-a-bit-closer-today-with-horizon-workrooms/

[Tad Noodle]

I came across this recently and thought I would share

https://www.gather.town/

[Sanny Yoshikawa]

"because it maps to a real surface in the real world you can lean on it or put a coffee on it without it falling to the floor and spilling on your shoes." But I know when I drink coffee I will hit my cup to the Quest 2 and spilling my coffee everywhere.