Do Meta Horizon workrooms work? Clients say yes… and no

It’s a rhetorical question, but statements by LeBeau when we met at the Workrooms for an interview a few weeks ago suggest he objects to that premise. First, people don’t spend their lives in virtual reality—sessions typically last from 15 minutes to an hour, rarely more than two, he says. The cost is less than many smartphones on average, it has dropped significantly since The first generation Oculus Rift debuted in 2016 for $600..

And while LeBeau refuses to share specific numbers, he says it helps keep remote teams willing to discuss issues together, seemingly face-to-face. The updates planned for 2023 will make Workrooms more attractive to hybrid teams, he said. These include the ability to view 3D models and mixed reality, known as the Magic Room, which will allow local and remote workers to collaborate in the same shared space. Integration with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Windows is also possible. on my way in 2023.

Early testers had differing opinions as to whether the proposal was ready for prime time. Trevor Ainge, media and content specialist at s2s, says the first-person view in Workrooms — the feeling of being in the same space as your colleagues and having to physically turn around to meet someone’s gaze — is a noticeable improvement over Zoom or WebEX. .

“One of the things I struggled with in particular is the performative aspect of communication, where you look at a screen and see yourself, and Workrooms completely eliminates that for me,” Ainge says. “I find it much more natural to communicate.”

Others are less convinced. “You’re missing out on the emotional part because no one recognizes your face,” said Sergey Toporov, a London-based partner at LETA Capital, an investment firm that tested the software last summer. “They have a pretty good lip-sync feature that looks natural when you’re talking, but when you stop talking you start to smile a little, which is weird.”

The virtual whiteboard also drew complaints from early testers. While s2s plans to continue using the software, LETA Capital abandoned it after discovering that users were unable to interact with financial models in Google Sheets while at the whiteboard. The digital whiteboard, which must be set up before entering Workrooms, can be written on by turning one of the two Quest controllers upside down and using it as a pen. But anything you write on the board, or sticky notes you can stick to it, are just overlays; they do not change the rendered native file.

“Your first move is to take your finger or the Oculus controller and put something into the camera,” says Toporov. “But you actually have to go back to your laptop, even if you see the picture, and use your keyboard to change the value.”

Typing in Workrooms can be something of an adventure, too, says Ari Lightman, a professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University who tried out Workrooms with his graduate students in the Measuring Social Media course.

“I don’t remember what line of text it was, but imagine the worst autocorrect. Everything was crazy and blurry,” he says. As a workaround, Lightman took off his headset to type notes in the Meta Remote Desktop app using his physical keyboard.

Before doing any work, you need to go through the rather laborious process of charging the headset (charging the battery takes about two and a half hours and about the same amount of time), connecting the headset to the Meta Quest smartphone application, creating an account and going through a long series of authentications. To avoid colliding with a nearby wall or chair, users also need to set up a laser-like 3D point cloud called the Guardian that appears when they approach pre-set room boundaries. All of this raises the question of whether it’s worth investing in a 30-minute meeting or an hour-long meeting when other video conferencing platforms allow users to sign in without an account in a few clicks.