It works across both virtual reality and the web and is designed to improve your team’s ability to collaborate, communicate, and connect remotely, through the power of VR- whether that’s getting together to brainstorm or whiteboard an idea, work on a document, hear updates from your team, hang out and socialize, or simply have better conversations that flow more naturally,” explains Facebook.Īlternatively, the solution can be summed up as: making everybody a Wii avatar and translating them and your workspace into a VR space.įacebook says that it will blend the real world with virtual reality to create a mixed reality experience. “Workrooms is our flagship collaboration experience that lets people come together to work in the same virtual room, regardless of physical distance. Not that it's so bad being a robot-as long as it gets me out of taking an Uber across to town to watch a PowerPoint.Look, we’re as fatigued by Zoom calls and Teams meetings as much as the next person but if you asked us if we’d prefer to have a VR headset stuck to our face eight hours a day, we’d take a lifetime of Zoom calls instead.įacebook, however, believes that this is the future of work and has launched Horizon Workrooms for the Oculus Quest 2. Early among those, Romo promises, will be avatar customization. (AltspaceVR's desktop application has been up and running for about a year now, and is often used by people to watch Netflix together, but a mobile gathering like this presents a much larger challenge.)ĪltspaceVR's technology isn't ready for a wide rollout, but the company is moving as fast as it can: it just opened signups for a limited alpha test of its mobile app, and for the rest of the week it'll be announcing new functions for its mobile and desktop apps. But streaming a video to a group of people dispersed over thousands of miles? That's a first. Streaming video is possible in VR earlier this year, I conducted a live VR video chat session with the company NextVR while they were on the beach and I sat in my office. The interesting thing is that the YouTube video is streaming live. The interesting thing isn't that there's a video playing in VR that's a mainstay of virtual movie theaters. Except in Altspace, where the collected journalists laugh.or at least titter politely. "Oh, that's cold," I say without thinking-after all, talking to the screen in VR has always been like talking to your TV during a movie or a single-player video game. Then Romo advances the screen to a video of the now-ironic "Who Wants a Stylus?" moment from Steve Jobs' 2007 Macworld address. What those of us in this room are experiencing is the very first glimmer of that future. That being said, if you've ever had to attend a tech conference or fly across the country for a two-hour meeting, the promise of being able to skip the travel in favor of a virtual confab is an attractive one. Social applications have been one of the toughest puzzles for VR engineers to crack for a host of reasons: networking, avatars, real-time interactions, voice and video throughput, and all kinds of things that your computer or phone would rather not have to worry about while it's rendering a fluid virtual environment. This is a press conference-or product launch, or presentation, or robot uprising, or whatever you want to call it-for virtual-reality company AltspaceVR, to announce that it's finally cracked telepresence for the Samsung Gear VR mobile headset. Oh, and the meeting room is perched on a hilltop surrounded by nothingness, and the dozen or so robots in the room are VR avatars for people who physically speaking are all over the country (and even as far away as Italy). Not in that Mondays-amirite office-humor way, either I don't mean corporate drones, I mean literal featureless robots. Unless, that is, you're a featureless robot, and everyone else in the room is a featureless robot, and the person talking you through the presentation is a featureless robot. If you've seen one slide deck in a meeting, you've seen them all.
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