Like almost all our activities, the work area has been changing over the years. Nevertheless in recent months due to the pandemicAnd if before some could have the opportunity to have a remote job and only meet occasionally, remote jobs came abruptly for most workers. A change that has caused us to reconsider what it means to be in an office, the pros and cons, and Facebook Workrooms wants to revolutionize remote work with new tools that allow maintaining closeness with collaborators despite not being in the same room.
Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse begins with Workrooms
Facebook Workrooms will be part of the new vision of , an idea that seems to come out of a science fiction story but that aims to unite physical reality with virtual space through augmented reality. In other words, it is a new, more experiential way of interacting and developing our daily lives on a virtual plane.
According to “Working without colleagues around you can feel isolated at times, and brainstorming with other people just doesn’t feel the same if they’re not in the same room.”
Now Facebook Workrooms is presented as the new application that will be the first attempt to create a social network that mixes this virtual reality experience in a space for people to work together…at a distance.
Features available in Facebook Workrooms
Facebook Workrooms works both in virtual reality using its , and in the web versionand has been designed to «enhance your team’s ability to collaborate, communicate and connect remotely through virtual reality, whether it’s meeting to brainstorm, brainstorming on a whiteboard, working together on a document or listening to the latest news and updates on the work team, hanging out and socializing, having conversations that flow more naturally». In Workrooms you can:
Show your desktop, computer and keyboard inside virtual reality
Workroom is presented as a “mixed reality” experience where you can really work, since you will see your tools such as the keyboard and the desktop of your computer in front of you, at the virtual meeting table using the Oculus Remote Desktop app and take notes, take and share files with coworkers, or even share your screen for a presentation.
new avatars
According to Facebook, the new and improved Oculus Avatars and spatial audio technology offer a wide variety of customization options, showing more expressive and naturalwhich makes “you feel like you’re really there, with your collaborators”, plus the conversation sounds more realistic with low latency and high-quality spatial audio, so you’ll hear people wherever they’re sittingjust as they would sound in a real room.
virtual whiteboard
What is a meeting room without a board to express our ideas? In Facebook Workrooms you can write on the board with a pen, pin pictures from your computer and mark them up. Whiteboards keep data for as long as you need, so you can come back and continue working where you last left off, plus their information can be exported to a file.
Set up your meeting room
Only here you can create a new design for the virtual room, adapting it to your needs whenever you want. Whether your goal is conversation, paper presentation, or collaboration, you’ll be able to change the seating layout each time, and expand the room up and down to suit the size of your group.
Video call access
Not everyone will always have virtual reality glasses on hand, so Facebook lets anyone join Workrooms via video call just by using a meeting link. These types of participants will appear on a video screen within the virtual room, just as they would in a real conference room.
Facebook Workrooms can host up to 16 people in virtual reality and 50 people via video call. To start using Workrooms you need to create a special account, download the Workrooms app on Oculus, and then link your glasses with the Workrooms account created by entering a code.
A more complete form of interaction than video calls
Facebook has been using Workrooms internally for its meetings for the past six months. «I think that these kinds of experiences, in which one can feel present with other people, it is a much richer way of interacting than the types of social apps that we have been able to create on mobile or computers»he assured.
Of course, despite being a more investment-oriented and inclusive solution, Zuckerberg’s has a long way to go before it’s compelling enough for people to replace their devices, at least not on a large scale for now.
However, it is clear that we are witnessing a new change in the way we interact and how we use the internet itselfand who knows, maybe in a couple of years we’ll all be together in Workrooms or some other part of the Oculus Horizon project and the metaverse, as we saw a few months ago with the case of the virtual reality event platform of the social network.
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