Thanks to the newly standardized remote work culture, Facebook on Thursday launched a test of Horizon Workrooms, a virtual reality app where users of the company’s Oculus Quest 2 headphones can hold meetings as avatar versions of cartoon and creepy.
FACEBOOK via REUTERS A look at Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms virtual reality app.
The app also allows workers to collaborate with other users via a whiteboard, transmit what they carry, and use their hands instead of remote controllers, among other features, according to Facebook’s corporate website.
“We shouldn’t be physically together to feel present, collaborate, or brainstorm,” Zuckerberg said during a demonstration of the app for journalists, according to CNET. who was present at the demo and reviewed the app on their YouTube channel.
The app is part of the CEO’s vision of turning Facebook into a “metaverse,” a Silicon Valley buzzword that Zuckerberg described in The New Yorker earlier this month as “a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces.”
It’s an “embodied Internet that’s inside, rather than just looking at it,” he told the magazine, adding that he believes the “metaverse” will be “the successor to the mobile Internet.”
Despite Zuckerberg’s high hopes for the app, people on Twitter weren’t delighted with the tech mogul’s idea of making virtual work meetings even more awkward (and rather nightmarish) given the different levels of skill of workers with technology (hello, lawyer who got locked in kitten mode in Zoom).
To read very funny comments from people about the new app, just scroll down without expensive headphones necessary.
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