**Facebook's Horizon Workrooms: A Step towards Virtual Collaboration**

As I sat down with Mark Zuckerberg to discuss Facebook's latest innovation, Horizon Workrooms, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and curiosity. This new app is part of Facebook's ambitious plans to build a metaverse that brings people together across devices and environments. And what better way to test the waters than by using it myself?

**The Experience of Horizon Workrooms**

I put on my VR headset and was transported into a virtual workspace, complete with 3D avatars and a spacious environment that felt almost like being in an office. The experience was surprisingly comfortable, and I found myself feeling more relaxed and present than I would in a traditional video conference setting. But what really struck me was the sense of comfort and anonymity that came with wearing VR - I could wear whatever I wanted, from cargo shorts to a New York Jets shirt, without worrying about being judged or seen.

As I chatted with my virtual colleagues, I couldn't help but feel like we were actually in a room together. The avatars felt almost lifelike, and the sense of presence was almost indistinguishable from being there in person. It's a small step towards creating a more immersive and interactive experience, one that could potentially change the way we work and collaborate online.

**Facebook's Ambitions and the Metaverse**

For Facebook, Horizon Workrooms is just one piece of a larger puzzle - a vision for a metaverse that brings together people, devices, and environments in a seamless and intuitive way. The company has big ambitions, and its focus on building social glue between all of your devices could have a profound impact on the way we work and interact online.

But there's still a lot to be worked out - questions about who will control this new virtual space, how it will be used, and which devices will be supported are all still up for debate. And then, of course, there's the elephant in the room: the ecosystem battle that's already underway between companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

**The Future of Virtual Work**

One thing is certain - virtual workspaces are going to become increasingly important as technology advances. The ability to work from anywhere, at any time, could revolutionize the way we approach remote work and collaboration. And with Horizon Workrooms, Facebook is taking a major step towards making that vision a reality.

But for now, it's still early days. I had to take breaks every hour or so because of VR fatigue - it's definitely not something you can do all day! But despite the limitations, I was struck by how much potential this technology has. The ability to bring my laptop into a virtual space and work from there completely changed my experience of working from home.

**The Road Ahead**

So what does the future hold for Horizon Workrooms and Facebook's metaverse? Only time will tell, but one thing is certain - it's going to be an exciting journey. As Mark Zuckerberg put it, "we're focused on this... we think it's gonna be a big use case for VR". And I couldn't agree more.

For now, Horizon Workrooms is just one step in the right direction. It may not be perfect, but it's a glimpse into a future where work and collaboration are seamless, intuitive, and accessible to everyone.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eni just had a meeting with mark zuckerberg we talked about the future of work i took notes on my laptop with my ghost hands that's because we were meeting in vr with facebook's new workspace called horizon workrooms horizon workrooms is a vr app and to use it you need an oculus quest 2 headset this is facebook's vr headset that's been out since last fall the idea is that you put this on and then all of a sudden you're in some sort of a work space with a whole bunch of other people moving around and talking and sitting at your desks there have been other vr apps like this spatial has something like this that i've tried in the past year or so where you get to meet with people and you get to walk around virtual things microsoft has a new tool called microsoft mesh that's looking to do a similar thing with holographic avatars in ar and vr but were facebook's horizon workrooms gets a lot weirder and more interesting is that it takes your computer with you and your desk so when i did the demo i had to scan my desk as part of the experience oculus actually had this tool built into the quest too to bring your desk and even some keyboards into vr to type and work on that screen that you're wearing on your face now workrooms also pulls off another trick it casts your computer screen into the vr experience and what it feels like is it displays a hovering screen in front of your desk kind of like a disembodied monitor between that and my keyboard which i could see floating in front of me i felt like i had a computer that i could work on i was working in slack i was doing google docs stuff while i was attending the meeting which was crazy that's the thing about vr right now is you put on the headset and then you're trapped in this world where you can't get back to your other devices if you're diving into this virtual universe why can't you take your other tech tools with you the other thing you can do in horizon workrooms is draw on a whiteboard there's a really clever trick where your controller can flip around and become a marker in the world so if i write on my actual desk it turns into a drawing that i can then post onto the whiteboard and even the table that you're sitting at can change configurations we're all sitting at this multi-faceted circular table that look like we're all together but i could feel my own desk surface that can reconfigure into a different type of conference room table or even rows like a classroom where suddenly we were all looking at a whiteboard and then we went back again but it's pretty much a seated experience facebook's starting with laptops and it's a beta app so things were a little weird like mark zuckerberg dropped in to talk to me and a bunch of other reporters in that room the idea is like you go in wherever you are you can have your perfect setup you can have all your your different monitors um you know people can can stop in and collaborate quickly but it's it's really great for kind of focused work um and that will get better over time the second area is around collaboration which is really what this is focused on which is you know the notion that like we shouldn't really have to have to physically be together to feel present or collaborate or brainstorm sometimes my hands didn't always move the way i wanted them to there's hand tracking which happens via the oculus quest ii front cameras so you can move your hands around point at people or wave sometimes that drops out or it gets a little jittery it might look like i was raising my hand when i wasn't and then finally there's the fact that you're a cartoon avatar and that's because when you're working in vr there's no camera that's looking at what you really are looking like in the real world now in a whole world full of zooms and hangouts and face times we're used to seeing ourselves flat and our actual faces vr flips that so that you're able to move around but you lose your actual face eventually facebook wants to develop super realistic avatars that approximate our real world selves or maybe at some point ar glasses can find a way to scan us with cameras and show that part too but that's why when you look at what i'm doing in this work app it looks cartoonish because it's the best thing that can happen right now what you gain in that sense that i can look around at the table i lose that sense of hey that reporter i know what's he really looking at or mark zuckerberg is that him i believe it's him sounds like him actually mark zuckerberg also appeared on a video chat beforehand and then beamed in as the avatar now what's particularly interesting about horizon workrooms is this is something that facebook's been using for the last six months or so when i got to talk to mark zuckerberg earlier this year he had mentioned that people at facebook were dog fooding or using this type of vr work app to see how it functioned this is that app and the pitch is that it's something that's more creative and more like being in an office than just zooming so not something that you use all the time but something you might use if you feel like you want to get together with the team and chat a bit now i've used vr theater apps and other types of experiences that have put me together with people and it does have a kind of a a transporting presence type thing it makes me feel a little more relaxed than a zoom plus i can wear whatever i want i mean i was wearing cargo shorts and a crappy new york jets shirt and nobody knew i mean that's kind of thing you can get away with in vr because there are no cameras looking at you i wouldn't really want to do that all the time but it points out a kind of comfort i don't feel like i'm being seen i feel like i can be heard and i can still have some presence that's a little bit different than what zoom is like it's not quite the same fatigue but i felt a different fatigue which was just having this headset on all the time so where does this all go from here facebook has had great ambitions not just in vr and ar but in this idea of the metaverse trying to build some sort of social glue between all of your devices so that you can work in and out of vr and in and out of maybe their future ar glasses that project holograms and other things into the real world that stuff's not all fully here yet but facebook is trying to build other tools similar to horizon workrooms in fact they have this whole other app called facebook horizon that's a creative tool for building your own worlds with these same types of avatars that hasn't launched yet but it looks like workrooms is one piece of that puzzle i also asked mark zuckerberg about what about other devices things like phones could you take your phone out and work on it in vr which seems like it would be incredibly useful not yet but eventually as you can imagine these devices are going to get smaller more like my glasses i think that's the goal but the ecosystem battle is huge you've got a lot of companies playing in the space and they all want a piece of this puzzle and a part of your homework environment what apps will work which ones will feel comfortable and what ones will companies gravitate to we don't know so facebook's pioneering something that's very interesting but it's very early days there are a lot of different work tools in vr and after an hour my eyes felt pretty tired i needed a break and i do a lot of vr so obviously there's a real limit to how much you actually want to spend doing this but facebook's also working on bringing other people into it who aren't wearing vr headsets workrooms works with people who are doing video chat on computers and phones you could send an invite link and have them hop in we actually saw a screen where people were talking in one of those little zoom-like grids while we were all appearing as avatars it's one smaller step to where this future of virtual work might go and i've been working at home for a year and a half plus i wouldn't want to do all my work in vr but the ability to bring my laptop in a vr really changed the experience and i hope that there are more tools that allow you to do that to allow devices to work together because vr can't just be on an island and facebook's metaverse needs a lot of hook and help from other partners too you know i think video conferencing has gotten has taken us pretty far but um but i don't know i mean i can i can just tell you that when as we start you know planning to go back into the office um you know i'm i'm not super excited about about just continuing to have just this um you know have most video most meetings be over video um and what we're trying to move towards is a world where uh a lot of what we do is is in here and the people who can't be in here can can be on video so you can people can feel present that way if they're if if people aren't together in person physically so we're focused on this we think it's gonna be a big use case for vri just had a meeting with mark zuckerberg we talked about the future of work i took notes on my laptop with my ghost hands that's because we were meeting in vr with facebook's new workspace called horizon workrooms horizon workrooms is a vr app and to use it you need an oculus quest 2 headset this is facebook's vr headset that's been out since last fall the idea is that you put this on and then all of a sudden you're in some sort of a work space with a whole bunch of other people moving around and talking and sitting at your desks there have been other vr apps like this spatial has something like this that i've tried in the past year or so where you get to meet with people and you get to walk around virtual things microsoft has a new tool called microsoft mesh that's looking to do a similar thing with holographic avatars in ar and vr but were facebook's horizon workrooms gets a lot weirder and more interesting is that it takes your computer with you and your desk so when i did the demo i had to scan my desk as part of the experience oculus actually had this tool built into the quest too to bring your desk and even some keyboards into vr to type and work on that screen that you're wearing on your face now workrooms also pulls off another trick it casts your computer screen into the vr experience and what it feels like is it displays a hovering screen in front of your desk kind of like a disembodied monitor between that and my keyboard which i could see floating in front of me i felt like i had a computer that i could work on i was working in slack i was doing google docs stuff while i was attending the meeting which was crazy that's the thing about vr right now is you put on the headset and then you're trapped in this world where you can't get back to your other devices if you're diving into this virtual universe why can't you take your other tech tools with you the other thing you can do in horizon workrooms is draw on a whiteboard there's a really clever trick where your controller can flip around and become a marker in the world so if i write on my actual desk it turns into a drawing that i can then post onto the whiteboard and even the table that you're sitting at can change configurations we're all sitting at this multi-faceted circular table that look like we're all together but i could feel my own desk surface that can reconfigure into a different type of conference room table or even rows like a classroom where suddenly we were all looking at a whiteboard and then we went back again but it's pretty much a seated experience facebook's starting with laptops and it's a beta app so things were a little weird like mark zuckerberg dropped in to talk to me and a bunch of other reporters in that room the idea is like you go in wherever you are you can have your perfect setup you can have all your your different monitors um you know people can can stop in and collaborate quickly but it's it's really great for kind of focused work um and that will get better over time the second area is around collaboration which is really what this is focused on which is you know the notion that like we shouldn't really have to have to physically be together to feel present or collaborate or brainstorm sometimes my hands didn't always move the way i wanted them to there's hand tracking which happens via the oculus quest ii front cameras so you can move your hands around point at people or wave sometimes that drops out or it gets a little jittery it might look like i was raising my hand when i wasn't and then finally there's the fact that you're a cartoon avatar and that's because when you're working in vr there's no camera that's looking at what you really are looking like in the real world now in a whole world full of zooms and hangouts and face times we're used to seeing ourselves flat and our actual faces vr flips that so that you're able to move around but you lose your actual face eventually facebook wants to develop super realistic avatars that approximate our real world selves or maybe at some point ar glasses can find a way to scan us with cameras and show that part too but that's why when you look at what i'm doing in this work app it looks cartoonish because it's the best thing that can happen right now what you gain in that sense that i can look around at the table i lose that sense of hey that reporter i know what's he really looking at or mark zuckerberg is that him i believe it's him sounds like him actually mark zuckerberg also appeared on a video chat beforehand and then beamed in as the avatar now what's particularly interesting about horizon workrooms is this is something that facebook's been using for the last six months or so when i got to talk to mark zuckerberg earlier this year he had mentioned that people at facebook were dog fooding or using this type of vr work app to see how it functioned this is that app and the pitch is that it's something that's more creative and more like being in an office than just zooming so not something that you use all the time but something you might use if you feel like you want to get together with the team and chat a bit now i've used vr theater apps and other types of experiences that have put me together with people and it does have a kind of a a transporting presence type thing it makes me feel a little more relaxed than a zoom plus i can wear whatever i want i mean i was wearing cargo shorts and a crappy new york jets shirt and nobody knew i mean that's kind of thing you can get away with in vr because there are no cameras looking at you i wouldn't really want to do that all the time but it points out a kind of comfort i don't feel like i'm being seen i feel like i can be heard and i can still have some presence that's a little bit different than what zoom is like it's not quite the same fatigue but i felt a different fatigue which was just having this headset on all the time so where does this all go from here facebook has had great ambitions not just in vr and ar but in this idea of the metaverse trying to build some sort of social glue between all of your devices so that you can work in and out of vr and in and out of maybe their future ar glasses that project holograms and other things into the real world that stuff's not all fully here yet but facebook is trying to build other tools similar to horizon workrooms in fact they have this whole other app called facebook horizon that's a creative tool for building your own worlds with these same types of avatars that hasn't launched yet but it looks like workrooms is one piece of that puzzle i also asked mark zuckerberg about what about other devices things like phones could you take your phone out and work on it in vr which seems like it would be incredibly useful not yet but eventually as you can imagine these devices are going to get smaller more like my glasses i think that's the goal but the ecosystem battle is huge you've got a lot of companies playing in the space and they all want a piece of this puzzle and a part of your homework environment what apps will work which ones will feel comfortable and what ones will companies gravitate to we don't know so facebook's pioneering something that's very interesting but it's very early days there are a lot of different work tools in vr and after an hour my eyes felt pretty tired i needed a break and i do a lot of vr so obviously there's a real limit to how much you actually want to spend doing this but facebook's also working on bringing other people into it who aren't wearing vr headsets workrooms works with people who are doing video chat on computers and phones you could send an invite link and have them hop in we actually saw a screen where people were talking in one of those little zoom-like grids while we were all appearing as avatars it's one smaller step to where this future of virtual work might go and i've been working at home for a year and a half plus i wouldn't want to do all my work in vr but the ability to bring my laptop in a vr really changed the experience and i hope that there are more tools that allow you to do that to allow devices to work together because vr can't just be on an island and facebook's metaverse needs a lot of hook and help from other partners too you know i think video conferencing has gotten has taken us pretty far but um but i don't know i mean i can i can just tell you that when as we start you know planning to go back into the office um you know i'm i'm not super excited about about just continuing to have just this um you know have most video most meetings be over video um and what we're trying to move towards is a world where uh a lot of what we do is is in here and the people who can't be in here can can be on video so you can people can feel present that way if they're if if people aren't together in person physically so we're focused on this we think it's gonna be a big use case for vr\n"