VR Office in Meta's Eyes: Certain Direction, Uncertain Time

Source & Author: VR Gyro

VR is often strongly associated with gaming, but it may one day also find its place in the office, offering a more immersive experience than video calls and a greater sense of presence.

That’s the idea behind Meta’s Horizon Workrooms, which provide a virtual 3D environment where colleagues can meet and interact as if they were face-to-face, regardless of geographical constraints. Attending a Workrooms meeting doesn’t necessarily require a VR headset, but using the Quest Pro, the company’s high-end business-focused headset launched last year, can make attendees’ avatars express a variety of expressions, thanks to five built-in IR headsets. Sensors that track changes in the user’s eyes and face.

The Workrooms app, which also lets users work alone in a virtual private office, is currently in beta and gives users access to their computer’s monitor and adds two additional virtual screens.

Meta has poured billions of dollars into developing VR technology in recent years, but VR as a collaboration tool is in its infancy, and the technology itself is constantly evolving. Currently, the use of virtual environments in everyday workplaces faces some limitations, especially in terms of hardware. The weight of the Quest Pro may make it uncomfortable for some to wear for extended periods of time, and the battery life isn’t long enough (Meta claims more than two hours of continuous use for productivity purposes).

Cost is also a consideration: Most businesses will need to have a good reason to pay $1,000 per Quest Pro device. Also, data privacy is an issue – Meta doesn’t have a great track record on this front – and the Quest Pro’s eye and face tracking can collect a lot of user data. However, Meta also claims that this data does not leave the device.

Horizon Workrooms is also still in development, with no official release date set yet, although a beta version of the app is already in widespread use. Before the official release, Meta is still continuing to improve the user experience, such as the lack of the ability to join video conferences. Although this is a seemingly simple function, it is also an important scene that Apple demonstrated many times when Apple Vision Pro was released.

Whether VR will become a common part of our working lives anytime soon remains to be seen, but the technology has a lot of potential to improve the meeting experience. Computerworld recently spoke with Mike LeBeau, Product Lead for Horizon Workrooms at Meta via Workrooms, to discuss design thinking for virtual environments and why VR may be the preferred method for team meetings in the future.

The following is a major summary of the exchange, appropriately edited based on the original text.

VR office platform design concept combined with new technology and product simplification

“We do think this technology (VR) is not just for gaming, we want to figure out how to make it a part of everyday life, like previous computing platforms had to do before they entered mainstream use. When we built Workrooms , we tried for the first time to combine a series of new technologies to achieve this goal, and thought - how can this technology be really applicable to actual work needs, not just games?”

“When we started this project, we discovered a lot of interesting things. We leveraged mixed reality, hand tracking, remote desktop, spatial audio and expressive digital avatars, the perfect combination of technologies to make the working experience feasible and Attractive."

“Another challenge that’s been in the history of VR is that it’s hard to resist the temptation to ‘overcomplicate the interface.’ You go into this medium and you feel like you can do anything with it: you can go to the moon, you can go to a rocket ship. These It’s great for games, and it’s even great for certain work environments. But it’s really against the spirit of what we’ve been designing for Workrooms, which is thinking about how to simplify it for people who don’t necessarily People with preconceptions can also find value in what we’re doing here.”

"So we designed a series of simplifications into the experience where instead of saying, ‘Oh, we can do anything,’ we said, 'Well, we need to do this really, really well to make this happen. Make sure people can Get an experience that works. Our philosophy is: How do we minimize the distractions in that experience so that social presence and those value propositions around doing things better can come into focus and work.”

VR conferences and video calls will coexist for a long time, the former is an intermediate solution

"Probably, for quite some time, these things will coexist. We don’t see ourselves replacing video calls completely, at least not at this stage. As technology becomes more advanced, more seamless and more comfortable, there will always be One day, the idea of using a headset instead of a monitor may make more sense for many jobs. Maybe then you can imagine every meeting as a virtual meeting, but in the meantime, it’s more about thinking about when to use a headset is most useful.”

“What we’ve found so far, both in terms of our own use cases and external early use cases, are two situations that seem to be the most compelling.”

“One situation is for a large group of people, and the conversations don’t flow as well on a video call. Those are harder to schedule in VR—you have to get everyone on the headset at the right time—but we’re seeing some Companies and teams are already doing this, especially for those scheduled meetings. Maybe it’s a stand-up meeting where we’re all debriefing on project progress: In these times, what you can do in VR versus what you can do in video The difference between what you do is obvious.”

“Another situation is when you have a specific task to accomplish and you want to work alongside someone. We’ve only scratched the surface so far, things like whiteboarding and brainstorming. But these types of use cases (there are a lot of ) is worth bringing together in VR. If it’s just chatting, and all you’re really doing is a 10-minute face-to-face meeting, sometimes video chat is more appropriate because you can see each other’s real faces, you can see anything in their space."

“We’re not trying to say VR is generally better, but there are a lot of situations where you really value the feeling of being physically together. For those use cases, we think we can provide a space between having to make a video call and having to fly to someone’s place of residence. An intermediate solution between local talent and being with them."

“From our perspective, that’s the power of VR and why we think it’s worth it, especially when you’re going to have an hour-long meeting every day, putting on a headset and working with other people.”

Meta is exploring the application of personal VR office needs

“Is it convincing that we’re looking at what it’s like to be a solo worker in VR? Of course, most people aren’t ready to work 8 hours a day in a VR headset, which probably wasn’t designed for that just yet. Yes. Battery life, comfort … all of these factors affect the length of time people wear the headset. Again, these are things that the hardware will improve over time.”

“But at the same time, we still have reasons to think that this is an interesting application scenario. One example of this is what we call a “personal office” in Workrooms. We are doing some cool things and starting to explore the “alone” scenario the value of.

“One is accessing a very large virtual screen. Let’s say you’re traveling and you’re in a hotel room. You’ve got your laptop with you, but you’re doing a coding project or a statistics project and you need a lot of screens. At that point, if VR becomes created something you could carry around in your bag, put it on your head when you were in a hotel room, and then, all of a sudden, on the same table in your hotel room, you had three giant Screens. The space available in VR brings interesting value to personal work.”

The release date of the official Meta version of “Horizon Workrooms” has not yet been determined

“We haven’t announced a timeline yet, not even fully internally. We do see the beta as a way to let our customers know that this is still something we’re working on, but it’s too early. It may change as we figure out what is valuable to people."

“Having said that, we’re really trying to make sure that the core experience is as smooth as possible. One advantage video calling has over VR right now is that it’s usually just a ‘click’ to get into a video call. Over the last few years, This approach has become very powerful and effective. VR has a long way to go to achieve this goal: there are still many steps that need to be performed to achieve this goal.”

“While we believe the technology is ready to serve a wider audience, it needs to ensure that it can be used as seamlessly as video calling, otherwise (the debugging cost) will make most people abandon. If video calling is faster and more convenient , then people will choose video calls, which is a direction we are working hard on.”

“At the last Meta Connect event, we talked about a mixed reality (feature) we were working on called Magic Room, the idea is to have people in the same physical space join Workrooms together to share content and interact with other people remotely. Meetings, which means we’re using a physical space rather than a virtual room to host a meeting. So there’s a lot of different directions to find value.”

“My idea is that we’re trying to reduce the barriers to adoption of VR as much as possible. This goes through the entire stack: from hardware and comfort to the operating system, making sure it’s always smooth and easy to use.”

Privacy and security: face tracking and eye tracking data will only be saved locally

“Obviously, we take this very, very seriously because these devices do collect a lot of data from your face. It’s all processed locally on the device and not shared with Meta. We build the model separately from this to make sure that (the device ) is suitable for users. These data will not be shared with Meta, and you can control to turn it on or off at any time.”

“You’ll notice that when you’re done setting it up, it asks you, ‘Do you want this app to have access to facial expressions?’ Other apps can also request this. Facial expressions, but don’t allow it to save facial data. The same goes for Meta, we don’t share that data with the Meta cloud - it’s purely on-device.”

There are certain differences between Meta and Microsoft in the field of VR office thinking

"We’ve been working on nurturing this ecosystem, and it’s very exciting to have Microsoft as a key partner in this effort. They’re developing a Windows 365 type of experience where you can run applications to access your Windows computer. They’re developing The Microsoft Teams for VR experience, which is their own idea of how to collaborate in VR, is completely separate from Workrooms. And then we’re also working with them on how to integrate Teams calling into Workrooms.”

“Part of what people want is to be able to use existing tools and then benefit from VR. We want to enable people in Workrooms to be able to say: Let’s connect a Teams call connection here and do it in VR.”

“I think we’re all in this learning phase and learning from each other about all these different use cases. So it’s really exciting to have them as partners in that.”

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