Facebook introduced a new professional collaboration service Thursday that allows users to come together via Oculus virtual reality headsets, another step toward building a “metaverse,” a world where reality and the internet eventually come together. A harmonious combination, according to the state of California. institution.

In the Workrooms, participants appear around a round table in the form of a personal avatar, resembling cartoon characters. They can interact via the microphone, draw on the virtual whiteboard using remote controls that repeat their gestures or even broadcast the screen in front of them, in the room they are physically in.

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– oculus August 19, 2021

“Improve your team’s ability to collaborate”

The company said in a statement about le blog d’Oculus, the brand of virtual reality (VR) headsets acquired by Facebook in 2014. “It works as well in virtual reality as it does on the web and is designed to improve your team’s ability to collaborate,” she adds.

The new technology is available in beta for users of the Quest 2 headphones. Colleagues who do not have this equipment can join meetings via video calls. Fin juillet, Facebook an annoncé la création d’une équipe dédiée au “metaverse”, c’est-à-dire un “méta-univers” où se fondent le réel et le virtuel, une vision de science-fiction déjà présente dans des video games. The metaverse represents the successor to the mobile internet and the future of the social network, according to its founder Mark Zuckerberg.

“To achieve our metaverse vision, we need to build the connecting fabric between (different) digital spaces in order to overcome physical limitations and be able to navigate between them just as easily as moving between rooms in a home,” his boss detailed on his Facebook profile. He explained that screens, holograms, virtual reality headsets and gradually augmented reality glasses are supposed to allow smooth “movements” of virtual universes in physical places, such as “teleportation”.

“The primary quality of the metaverse will be being present and feeling really present with people, and FRL (Facebook Reality Labs, department responsible for the project, editor’s note) has been building products that have brought presence in different digital spaces for years.” Oculus has largely focused on video games so far, but the department is also exploring other applications, from tourism to remote work.