Facebook Wants Your Meetings to Be More than Just Zoom Calls

Isaac Taylor

Zoom calls are so 2020. But no longer will we need to mask our deteriorating living environments with virtual backgrounds. No more shall we need to go “woah, is that actually what I look like?” when your webcam blazes to life and shows how you look at 9am in the morning after you got up not 5 minutes prior to the daily meeting. All of this is in the past with the introduction of Facebook’s Horizon: Workrooms for the Quest 2.

The Quest 2 has been a massively successful VR Headset, that may have been gathering a bit of dust during workhours, but now Workrooms, which has just hit beta, gives us an opportunity to really stretch its legs on something other than Beat Sabre. Workrooms is a virtual meeting environment taking advantage of mixed-reality desk and keyboard tracking, hand tracking, remote desktop streaming, video conferencing integration, spatial audio, and the new Oculus Avatars. It plonks users into a virtual boardroom they can interact with, alongside group members phoning in via the web in a more standard format, meaning Kathy from Accounting won’t miss out just because she doesn’t know what VR is. In total, six people in VR can join together, and up to 50 people total on a video call.

Using mixed reality means you can bring your desk in with you, alongside your desktop and keyboard, meaning you aren’t hamstrung from getting things done during the meeting. Everything you do is accessible later online. Every room in Workrooms comes with a place on the web to capture notes and action items while you’re in a meeting, share links and files, and chat with your team. You can also sync your Outlook or Google Calendar to make it easier to schedule meetings and send invites.

Conversations and audio are also spatial, meaning that the conversation will feel more natural, not sounding like its blasting out of a single source.

Oculus has also found a new use for your controller. Flipping it around and holding like a pen allows you to use it as a whiteboard marker. The whiteboard can handle jpgs pinned from your desktop and can hang around in perpetuity as long as you keep using the same room. Any final notes on the board can be exported to your machine as a jpg.

If you’re thinking about spicing up your daily check-ins with your team, give Workrooms a look at workrooms.com.

If there was ever a time for VR to shine and prove it has practical use cases, this is it. Fingers crossed it takes off.