Last week's launch of Facebook's Horizon Workrooms garnered a lot of guffaws due to its sheer Zuckerbergian much-ness, but beneath the VR-for-office meetings platform is some impressive tech.
On his blog, Jim "Babbage" Purbrick (who helped lead development of Workrooms) goes into detail on a key Workrooms feature -- virtual mapping of the user's real meeting location/surroundings:
[Workrooms] shows you an entirely virtual environment, but asks you to indicate the position of real world objects like your desk in a process which feels like a more detailed guardian setup process. Workrooms then positions your avatar in the virtual world so that your real desktop aligns with your virtual desktop.
When you reach out and touch the virtual desk your hands touch the real desk. As long as the important virtual objects within arms reach are mapped to real objects, the virtual environment can be much bigger than the available real space while maintaining the illusion that every virtual object can be touched as well as seen.
Jim (who left Facebook late last year) allows that this is not the type of set-up you want to be strapped into for your entire day: "Currently you wouldn't want to use a Quest all day," as he puts it. "But you could easily attend several typical hour long meetings a day without feeling uncomfortable."
Throughout the pandemic, the Oculus group developing Workrooms would actually use their own platform to hold meetings:
"During lockdown we'd have most regular team meetings in Workrooms and fall back to normal voicechat meetings when we needed to talk to people who weren't using it yet."
The Quest's ability to track a user's hand gestures contributed to that:
"Having a collaborative whiteboard is a huge benefit over Zoom. While it's possible to share a collaborative drawing canvas in a normal voicechat call, there is a whole layer of body language and gesturing that makes it much more effective when you have avatars standing at a virtual surface working together and drawing to illustrate their ideas." (If only, perhaps, because a P mouse/Mac trackpad is too cumbersome to bother with a 2D whiteboard.)
"In retrospect it was pretty amazing how quickly we got used to Workrooms and just got on with whatever meeting we were having, even though we were intentionally looking for rough edges we could improve while using it," Jim says. Whether other remote workers using Workrooms will find it just as intuitive and useful way remains to be seen, but I suspect those in tech-centric, visually-oriented fields will."
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