Bosworth said he expects people will use the app for about 30 minutes at a time, and that another team at Facebook is working on improving the ergonomics and weight of VR headsets. He had been disconnected.Įven with the rollout of Workrooms, Facebook continues to suffer from some of the problems plaguing VR: it must convince people (or perhaps in this case companies) to buy its headsets, use them regularly, and adapt to new methods of interaction - both with the virtual world and with others within that world - that remain far from perfect.įor instance, while Quest 2 can track hands and even individual fingers - making it possible for users to do things like gesture naturally while talking or flash an okay sign in VR while using Workrooms - if you try to touch both hands together during a VR meeting, it’s likely they’ll simply overlap in an awkward way that breaks the illusion of reality and presence. While Bosworth, the Facebook executive, was in the middle of describing how he sees Workrooms as a more interactive way to gather virtually with coworkers than video chat, his avatar froze mid-sentence, the pixels of its digital skin turning from flesh-toned to gray. And Workrooms uses a combination of hand tracking and spatial audio - which accounts for room acoustics and makes sounds appear to come from specific directions - to allow users to interact with each other in ways that mimic real life, except for a sound cancellation feature that eliminates background noise.īut it’s clear Facebook is still working out some kinks. Headset wearers can view their real-life computer screen in VR via an accompanying desktop app. The app employs a slew of technologies and tricks to make the experience feel as in-person as it can be when you’re represented in virtual space by an animated approximation of yourself. It shows how far Facebook has progressed in blending hardware and software since its purchase of Oculus in 2014 - and how far it still has to go. Workrooms may offer users a sense of what’s to come. Horizon has yet to appear for most users and Facebook confirmed this week that the app remains in a private beta testing stage. Instead, it announced a virtual social world called Horizon, which was set to be released in 2020. The company shut down both VR apps in October 2019, however. The company launched virtual-hangout apps Oculus Rooms and Facebook Spaces in 20, respectively, which let small groups of users gather in VR. It’s not the first time Facebook and its subsidiary Oculus have tried to popularize social interaction via VR. He said Facebook has been using the app internally for about a year. He is convinced that VR will evolve into a technology that reshapes the way people interact and experience life, much like Facebook and smartphones already have.“The pandemic in the last 18 months has only given us greater confidence in the importance of this as a technology,” Andrew Bosworth, VP of Facebook Reality Labs, said while addressing a (virtual) room of about a dozen people on Tuesday. That's how much the Facebook CEO shelled out in 2014 to purchase Oculus from its founders (for comparison's sake Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram). "The problem is you will be spending that money on a device that only does VR and nothing else." VR is a $2 billion gamble that Zuckerberg wants to pay off "The strategy for Facebook is to make the onboarding to VR as easy and inexpensive as possible," he said. Gartner analyst Brian Blau said there's still one hurdle the Oculus Go will have to overcome. He wants a future where VR allows us work in offices like the one from Minority Report, instead of awkwardly waggling about while attached to a PC. Mr Zuckerberg shared the story of Dorothy Howard, an elderly woman who can't travel because of her health, who now uses VR to go on a holiday anywhere in the world. "If you can't think of any way that your reality could be better, then you're not thinking hard enough," he said.
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