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At this point in the pandemic, I would gladly attend a meeting that could have been an email if that meant being in the same room with a group of work friends. So when Facebook released Horizon Workrooms, an app that allows people to meet in an office in virtual reality, I was ready to keep an open mind to its potential.
After all, humanity seems destined to someday leap into the metaverse, the internet that we will not only use but inhabit, so why not discover a vision of what this might look like according to a powerful company that hope to help shape it, for better or worse.
Only two other people in my office own, or will admit to owning, an Oculus Quest 2 headset, the $ 300 headset required to experience Workrooms in VR. Together, we created a small chat group: this would be the first time we would try to connect with each other’s avatars in a virtual workspace.
The first Workrooms challenge: finding your way in a virtual meeting
Fortunately for Facebook, the lasting impressions of people’s experiences are heavily influenced by how they end, not how they begin. Unfortunately for us, our onboarding process was bumpy.
As the only Gen X member of the group, I was concerned that I would fall short of stereotypes that older employees would be baffled by new technology. So I was mortified that I couldn’t find my way into the first meeting room I was invited to. Instead, I landed on the virtual screen which acts as a portal for non-virtual guests to attend any gathering, as if it were a regular video call.
Looking through my helmet, I could see my cartoon avatar waiting to be teleported. On my laptop screen, the Quartz CEO avatar, a willing participant in our little experiment, sat alone. When I created a meeting room and invited it, we found ourselves in the same situation, but with our roles reversed. (For the record, it’s surreal and somewhat embarrassing to be a silly avatar looking at a picture of a real person on a video call screen. I understand why this feature has to exist when headsets aren’t there yet. in everyone’s tech arsenal, but I doubt avatar-video hybrid meetings will be a success.)
On our second attempt, I figured out what was wrong: While it seems intuitive to use your corporate email account to sign up for a workplace product, you actually have to log in with the same address you use for Facebook. It had not been obvious to me, nor to a third member of our group who also appeared for the first time on the video screen in his helmet. Bottom Line: If you’re going to give Workrooms a try, be prepared to share your old hotmail address, or maybe a nickname that’s not been in your life since college, with your peers and your manager. today.
The second Workrooms challenge: “What are my arms doing now?”
Eventually, the three of us gathered in the app’s conference room, where we first spent some time checking out our digital bodies. The Oculus had warned us that “legs might not be possible” in all applications, so it wasn’t really surprising to find our bodies disappearing into blue office chairs floating around at hip level, but it was embarrassing.
Turns out it’s not just the result of Facebook launching a product a little earlier., in VR, replicating legs that can walk or run is complicated, so they are also missing in other VR meeting apps, including the graphically richer Spatial app, and in MeetinVR.
You might imagine then that his virtual arms would make up for the missing lower limbs, but in Workrooms they were sometimes unwieldy, often busy with their own projects under our virtual boardroom table, or hanging in the air.
The app insists users turn on hand tracking so that your plastic controllers can be used as whiteboard pens, but the hand and finger functions seem problematic and frustrating. To pick up something or select menu items, you’re supposed to do a pinching motion with your real fingers, which takes practice. At times we seemed to lose our CEO’s attention as his avatar stared at his hands gripping the air, seemingly catching flies Karate Kid-style.
What we liked about our virtual conference
Next, we checked out what our avatars could do in the program’s bright and extremely generic conference room. Considering the resources Facebook would have at its disposal, we found the app’s list of awesome features surprisingly short. Here’s what we liked:
- Workrooms uses spatial audio, which means your coworker’s voice appears to be coming from the right direction from where they are virtually seated. This effect is probably the main reason why you feel like you are present with others when chatting and turning your head in the right direction to “look” at other avatars. That alone is a huge improvement over the jerky, one-way quality of a standard video call. (No one in our group had any nausea or dizziness during our test meeting, so there’s that too.)
- Above the virtual desk or table, each user has a Passthrough window, a space that allows people to see through the VR environment to their own room or real environment. This convenient slot allows you to see your real desktop, where you might have your laptop or phone, without removing your headset.
- Players can stand in front of the whiteboard when they need to make a presentation, a trick that is not in itself interesting. However, to access the whiteboard, you must physically stand up and walk a few feet in your remote room. Until you try this, you might not realize that you miss having a reason to get up and walk during a discussion at work. Zoom and other two-dimensional desktop apps pretty much require users to stay still.
- Finally, an optional add-on program integrated into the application, Oculus Remote Desktop, allows a person to access a virtual version of their real laptop from a workroom meeting. VR meeting participants can also check out notes and files to share in the conference room.
What’s not to like about Facebook’s metaverse
By adding the remote desktop, a person could, in theory, spend their entire day working in this alternate reality, entering and leaving virtual meetings. However, it’s unlikely that anyone actually wants to do this. After about 20 minutes, the Oculus 2 headset becomes hot and heavy on a person’s face. Long meetings would also mean charging equipment periodically, as work rooms seem to tax the battery.
But beyond the physical limitations, there’s a bigger problem: Virtual rooms are so boring that a person would quickly run out of reasons to stay there.
Yes, you can change the seating arrangement to face your peers or attend a presentation, and you can jump into a new seat in the blink of an eye just to see the room from different angles, but that’s it really. what is there. You can’t snuggle up over a cafe for casual conversation, tie up to foosball, or relax in a Moon Pod.
Workrooms, in other words, only recreates the things we don’t miss out on in office meetings, like the ability to watch someone give a PowerPoint presentation. Somehow, the world’s biggest social media site forgot to make its latest product social. And without unstructured time in the company of other people in VR or elsewhere, it’s hard to imagine having the kind of conversations that lead to creative breakthroughs and motivate people, or get people interested in the metaverse.
Metaverse? Meh-taverse
While it may be unfair to laugh at the details that will surely be fine-tuned as the software rolls out of beta – for example, how will the perpetually pleasing half-smiles on the faces of avatars land in serious discussions? – the application’s dry focus on a corporate ritual is a disappointment. We certainly expected to find more than a mundane conference room in the first virtual space Facebook debuted since Zuckerberg’s ode to the metaverse in a profit call.
Still, I had to admit when I took off my helmet that I felt like I had been somewhere else, with other people, for a change.
The virtual travel was not as energizing as the real office visit I took before the Delta variant started to roll in, and I think we’ll need more private spaces if we’re going to truly socialize in one. virtual office. But I do understand the optimistic predictions that the enterprise virtual reality market will grow, possibly reaching $ 4 billion by 2023. (A few large companies, including PwC, have already started experimenting with social media meetings. virtual reality.)
This is not a bad bet given the future that awaits us. One day, VR glasses might be lighter and the graphics less clunky than they are today, but office closures during serious public health crises or devastating weather events might be just as common.
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