NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — Facebook on Thursday unveiled a virtual reality app that lets remote workers feel like they're in the office among colleagues.
It's called "Horizon Workrooms."
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Using a VR headset, the user enters a virtual reality office as their own personally-designed avatar that can interact with co-workers, brainstorm, and give presentations.
"It's basically a virtual reality service for collaborating together and doing work," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Gayle King on "CBS This Morning." "It basically gives you the opportunity to sit around the table with people and work and brainstorm and whiteboard ideas. For people who can't be there, through virtual reality they can just video conference in so you can include everyone. It's this pretty amazing experience where you feel like you're really right there with your colleagues."
Facebook has already been using the new tool and Zuckerberg said he sees these virtual reality workspaces becoming common within five to 10 years, giving people the ability to live where they want and continue to work and feel like they are in the office.
It's part of Facebook's overall vision for the future.
"I think of the metaverse as the next generation of the internet. So you can kind of think about it as instead of being an internet that we look at, it's an internet that we are a part of or that we can be inside of," Zuckerberg said. "I always wanted to help build this kind of immersive system that you could be in with your friends and feel like you are present together, but go explore other planets, or other periods of time, or play games together, but feel like you were really in it together."
CNET's Ian Sherr said this is the first step for the virtual reality industry to move beyond video games and use the technology as an enhanced communication tool.
"The idea here is really to give a sense of, in this case, be able to create a room where people can meet and even though they're not talking to photorealistic images of one another, it doesn't feel like we're in the middle of a movie, it does feel like something where you can interact and they imagine this as the meeting room of the future," Sherr said. "Even though it's cartoonish, you actually feel like you're in a room with everyone. That is what they're kind of trying to figure out is the way for people to be able to communicate no matter where they are and across distances of either different cities, different states or even different countries."
Sherr believes some form of these virtual spaces will be the way professionals and others communicate in the future.
"I think there's a lot of things that Facebook needs to figure out," Sherr said. "Once they figure out a lot of the technological leaps, like making these headsets so they're not gigantic and instead look like a pair of glasses or even better...those types of things I think are things they really need to figure out before this becomes something."
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