A new VR remote Work App was launched by Facebook on Thursday. Users of the company’s Oculus Quest 2 headsets can hold conferences as avatars.
Many companies continue to work from home after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down physical workspaces, and as a new variant is sweeping the globe, Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms beta test is timely.
In recent weeks, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has talked about a futuristic “metaverse.”
The world’s biggest social community has invested closely in digital and augmented reality, growing hardware which includes its Oculus VR headsets, operating on AR glasses and wristband technologies, and buying a slew of VR gaming studios, inclusive of BigBox VR, to name only some examples.
If Facebook succeeds in gaining a dominant position in this space, which it believes will be the next big computing platform, it will be less dependent in the future on other hardware manufacturers, such as Apple.
“Boz” Bosworth, VP of Reality Labs at Facebook, said that the new Workrooms app gives “a good sense” of how the company envisions elements of the metaverse in the near future.
According to Bosworth, this is “one of those foundational steps” in the right direction during a VR remote Work App news conference.
It was coined in the 1992 dystopian novel “Snow Crash” to describe immersive, shared spaces that can be accessed across different platforms where the physical and digital merge. An “embodied internet,” according to Zuckerberg.
Recent earnings calls by tech CEOs have discussed how their companies could shape this futuristic world. These consist of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Roblox’s David Baszucki, and Match Group’s Shar Dubey.
To work on the metaverse project in July, Facebook announced it was creating a product team within its AR and VR group Facebook Reality Labs.
Avatar users can design avatar versions of themselves to meet in virtual reality conference rooms and collaborate on shared whiteboards or documents, while still using their own physical desk and computer keyboard. With the Quest 2 headsets, which cost about $300, you can connect up to 16 people in VR, and a total of 50 people with video conferencing. Bosworth said that Facebook now uses Workrooms for internal meetings on a regular basis.
As part of the agreement, Workrooms users’ conversations and materials will not be used to target ads on Facebook. In addition, users must adhere to Oculus’ VR community standards, which can be reported to Oculus if they violate them.
According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Facebook these days draws up the income of its Oculus Quest 2 headsets and brings back the foam face-liners because of reviews of skin irritability.
As a result of the recall, Quest 2 headset sales, which have yet to be officially announced by the company, are estimated to be around 4 million units. Revenue from AR and VR, as well as e-commerce, came to $497 million in the second quarter of 2021 for Facebook, which is a significant amount.
In the United States, Facebook is a company that offers online social networking services. Facebook was founded in 2004 by Harvard University students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. With a couple of billion users, half of whom used it daily, Facebook had become the world’s largest social network by 2012.
Facebook’s appeal stems in part from Zuckerberg’s insistence that participants be honest about who they are from the start; customers are prohibited from using fictitious names on the site.
The company’s management argued that transparency is important for forming non-public relationships, sharing thoughts and information, and constructing society as a whole. A peer-to-peer community of Facebook customers makes it less complicated for agencies to connect with consumers.
Facebook, which has a market capitalization of more than $600 billion, made $70.7 billion in sales last year. Therefore, Zuckerberg is one of the world’s wealthiest people today, according to Forbes.
