Several weeks ago Facebook launched its vision for work-based collaboration in virtual reality (VR), Horizon Workrooms. Designed to help colleagues connect remotely, this week it has been revealed that the highly popular video conferencing service Zoom will be integrated into Horizon Workroomsnext year.
Horizon Workrooms is currently in open beta for Oculus Quest headsets, allowing anyone to test the new software. With the integration of Zoom, users will be able to join Zoom Meetings and use Zoom Whiteboard directly within VR, to create what could be a seamless experience between the two platforms.
With companies having to switch to remote working during the course of 2020, many have turned to video platforms such as Zoom to stay connected. This has helped Zoom’s popularity soar but has also meant a new term being coined in the process, “Zoom fatigue”. Whereby people find themselves in so many video meetings that it just becomes mentally draining, lacking the fluidity of being together in person. So it’s no surprise that Zoom aims to combat such an issue with initiatives like this with Facebook.
A sneak peek was shown at Zoomtopia this week, Zoom’s annual conference (taking place virtually, of course!). Inside Horizon Workrooms users will be able to dial into those video calls as they normally would, so they can sit around a virtual desk with others in VR whilst talking to even more over Zoom. And with Zoom Whiteboard on hand, brainstorming new ideas shouldn’t be too difficult either as everyone in the meeting can add their input.
Zoom and Facebook haven’t said when they plan to integrate this functionality into Horizon Workrooms during 2022 but the software has plenty of features to keep you busy. There’s the mixed-reality desk and keyboard tracking, which alongside Oculus Quest’s hand tracking means you can see your desk and keyboard to naturally type as you would outside of VR. There’s also remote desktop streaming, spatial audio, and the new Oculus Avatars for that immersive feel.
There are plenty of other ways to collaborate in VR with Horizon Workrooms joining the likes of Spatial, MeetinVR and Arthur to name a few. For continued updates in this field, keep reading VRFocus.
Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms connects both VR and video chat users together in the same space. Although it’s still in beta, the company says that it’s gearing up to integrate Workrooms with popular video chat platform Zoom.
Starting in 2022, Workrooms users will be able to join Zoom Meetings and use Zoom Whiteboard from within VR, positioning the platform to connect a much broader userbase to users of the VR productivity app.
The company says in an Oculus blogpost that integration with Zoom will let users “dial into any existing Zoom Meeting right from Workrooms in VR,” which means you might have a legitimate reason to hang out in VR during work or school, provided you’re still distance learning or teleworking.
Image courtesy Facebook, Zoom
Zoom Whiteboard will also let you sketch out things in VR for all to see. We still need to learn more, however if it integrates seamlessly with Workrooms already robust toolset, it’ll be on a good path to make interacting with Zoom feel like a native VR experience.
Horizon Workrooms already supports up to 16 VR users and 36 video chat users simultaneously. It’s unclear whether Workrooms will allow for a mixed meeting point between Zoom and the app’s 2D video chat users in addition to VR users.
The companies say more information will arrive today at Zoom’s annual Zoomtopia conference. We’ll post an update here once we learn more.
The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating the use of virtual reality and augmented reality, experts say, especially in retail, education and health.
Taylor Freeman
“The trajectory is clear that this technology is set to become the next ubiquitous computing platform, much like we saw with mobile devices and personal computers,” Taylor Freeman, founder of Axon Park, an extended reality training simulation platform, told Hypergrid Business.
“Gaming has seen a large uptick in playtime and sales,” he said, “and personal well-being, with meditation and mindfulness apps.”
But the biggest growth areas are health care and education, he said, as well as events and conferences that have moved from in-person events to virtual reality.
And WaveXR just raised $30 million for its virtual events platform, which proves there are unique opportunities for augmented and mixed reality in the event space, as conventions, concerts and conferences start to move digital, Cory Grenier, CEO of Genee — an augmented reality authoring and publishing platform, told Hypergrid Business.
Dave Dolan
The growth is expected to continue after the pandemic. According to a May report by Vynz Research, the virtual and augmented reality market will grow from $22 billion of revenue this year to $161 billion by 2025.
“We are also seeing a surge in many other areas, such as showrooms, remote training and walk-throughs,” Dave Dolan, chief product officer at virtual reality education platform Veative, told Hypergrid Business. “Just in the last two months, we have seen a 30 to 40 percent increase in demand for remote training.”
Retail shopping and advertising
Seek XR, an extended reality company whose augmented reality platform is used by companies to increase sales and to create interactive customer experiences as well as for interactive learning, has noted a 600 percent increase in usage of augmented reality through its customers’ websites since the beginning of March when much of physical retail shut down.
Jon Cheney
To date, Seek XR has deployed more than 10 million experiences to over 100 million users.
And the company reports increases of between 10 200 percent in its corporate clients’ conversion rates — that’s the percent of visitors who turn into paying customers.
“Product returns are dropping by 25 percent and time to make buying decisions has been cut in half,” Seek XR CEO Jon Cheney told Hypergrid Business. “Augmented reality is making impacts with real return on investment that can’t be ignored, even without the looming fears of coronavirus.”
Some of these schools are turning to virtual and augmented reality to help address the needs of these students.
This was a challenge for some platforms, since students don’t usually have VR headsets at home.
Veative now has own virtual reality headset to diversify their products. (Image courtesy Veative.)
One such company, Veative, offers virtual reality-based STEM educational content, serving over 200 schools in more than 24 countries.
During the pandemic, the reported an increase in use — but only after they started to offer web-based mixed reality content that didn’t require that students have virtual reality headsets.
“We managed to pivot and offer our virtual reality content on web-based extended reality,” said Veative’s Dolan. “Schools have welcomed it and we expect to double our user base by the end of summer.”
Other organizations are responding to the challenge by issuing headsets to at-home users, especially enterprises using virtual reality for training.
Nathan Pettyjohn
“Lenovo’s ThinkReality team is receiving more customer inquiries specifically as a response to the global pandemic,” Nathan Pettyjohn, commercial augmented and virtual reality lead at Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group told Hypergrid Business. “Companies are looking for solutions to enhance their workforces through training and re-skilling with immersive virtual reality experiences or using augmented reality to enable workers to do more remotely or be more productive with fewer workers on site.”
It is supported by Lenovo’s ThinkReality software platform, on which companies and enterprises can deploy and manage applications and content.
Healthcare
During the pandemic, companies in healthcare are using virtual and augmented reality for health-based learning, simulation such as surgery, VR-based treatments, and remote monitoring of patients.
XRHealth, for example, has added 500 clinicians on-board its platform and between 500 to 1000 new active patients per month as a result of the pandemic.
The extended reality health company now runs extended reality clinics in 17 states in the United States, with certification from the Federal Drug Administration,
“During this time, both clinicians and patients are seeking out alternative and remote methods for treating various conditions,” company CEO Eran Orr told Hypergrid Business. “Extended reality is a unique platform that is designed to treat so many conditions like pain management, anxiety, memory loss, and hot flashes — and we have experienced a significant spike in interest during COVID-19.”
XRHealth supplies patients with virtual reality headsets.
“Our challenge is keeping up with the demand and letting others benefit from our solution, now that we are out there,” said Orr. “Many patients have expressed that they have been getting better results from using our platform than from in-person therapy since their time with clinicians is completely focused on them without the outside noise that comes with being in-person.”
I’m not often at a loss for words, but as I re-entered the real world after my second holographic media briefing this month, I realized that I was struggling to speak or type. Mentally, the sensation was awe — my sincere belief that I had just experienced the future of remote work and meetings. Yet physically, I was fighting off nausea, a reminder that though collaborative mixed reality experiences are now affordable and practical, people may not be ready for them to become the new work-from-home normal.
The breakthrough here is Spatial, a collaborative workspace app that just became available for the popular Oculus Quest VR headset. It’s not hyperbole to say that Spatial has unilaterally reignited my enthusiasm for the Quest, which has recently gathered dust on my desk, as the potent pairing enables me to quickly participate in 3D group meetings filled with multiple realistic participants. Instead of using cartoony avatars or floating video tiles, Spatial users appear as “holograms” with real faces, motion-sensed head and hand movements, and even lip motions keyed to their live voices.
At a time when workers are largely confined to home offices and prevented from attending physical gatherings, Spatial meetings feel like actual gatherings — and safe ones. Each of the briefings I’ve attended during the COVID-19 pandemic has been in a clean virtual meeting room, a welcome change from the crowded hotel ballrooms and convention halls typically used for major product announcements. In a Spatial gathering, there’s no need to worry about wearing a mask over your nose and mouth, but over time, you may notice the weight of the mixed reality headset.
Until recently, the Spatial holographic experience required a multi-thousand-dollar Microsoft or Magic Leap AR headset, but Spatial wisely widened its cross-platform support and temporarily dropped its pricing to bring more users to the table. For the duration of the pandemic, Spatial can be used for free by both enterprises and end users, giving businesses every incentive to test it out with the popular, fully standalone Quest — assuming they can find one (or a few) in stores. (Defying “VR is dead” pundits, the $399-$499 headsets keep selling out every time they briefly hit online store shelves.)
I can’t help but be impressed by the overall quality of the Spatial gatherings I’ve attended. While there have been tiny issues here and there, the totality of the experience is surprisingly, perhaps even amazingly, fluid. Step back for a moment and consider all the challenges of having five or ten people in different cities all interacting plausibly within a virtual space — collectively watching a live presentation, passing 3D objects back and forth, and taking turns talking — without constant hiccups. It’s somewhat remarkable that the biggest issues I’ve seen involved one participant dropping out due to a dead headset battery, and another experiencing a beta app crash. Early streaming video services couldn’t even do that much properly without frequent buffering, and Spatial makes 20 times as much complexity seem synchronous and effortless to its users.
On the other hand, I felt a little queasy as I took off the VR gear following an hour-long meeting, and I’m not exactly sure what did it. Was it the length of time I spent immersed? Or something about returning to the real world after focusing my eyes on the Quest’s 3D screens? As a fairly frequent VR user, I haven’t had these sensations for a long time, but I suspect that my eyes were trying to stay focused on some static visible pixels while my head moved during the presentation, and that eventually made me feel sick.
For Spatial and the companies that make mixed reality headsets, overcoming that sort of practical usability hurdle may seem like the final step in popularizing virtual work-from-home solutions. And initially, I might have agreed. It’s clear that virtual meetings that end with employees feeling nauseous isn’t the sort of “productivity” experience businesses are looking for. Moreover, Oculus and others are working on VR headsets with higher refresh rates and screen resolutions specifically to smooth the viewing experience for users, making it easier on their eyes and brains.
But as I think back to my latest meeting — where I had to stay focused on the presentation in front of me for an hour, without being able to take notes, check other apps, or attend to other real-world needs — I know that there’s another set of challenges yet to be tackled. Just like Apple’s iPad nailed the “right” tablet form factor but spent years struggling to get multitasking right, companies such as Spatial now have to formulate a cohesive modern XR work experience, one that’s more than just social gatherings, and speaks to the deeper, richer interactivity with objects and work tools that business users will expect to have in mixed reality spaces.
It goes without saying that delivering a comprehensive virtual working experience won’t be easy. After using Spatial, however, I’m optimistic that some great company or companies will make it happen in the not too distant future, and that holography and mixed reality will subsequently become as viable for working from home as desktop and laptop computing are today. I just hope I won’t need motion sickness medication to fully appreciate it.
The written content of this post by Jeremy Horowitz originally appeared on VentureBeat.
Gaming with friends is a lot of fun, but sometimes playing in person isn't possible. With that in mind, these are some of the best games to play over Zoom.
Over the last three weeks the engineers at VR startup Spaces started working 16 to 18 hour days from home in social isolation in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Within a few days they had a barebones version of a free add-on for Zoom and other video conferencing apps which allowed for joining the conversation from inside a PC VR headset. After three weeks now they’ve added a subscription tier to the software which allows for some pro features, like the removal of a watermark, HD streaming, and priority support.
The startup co-founded by Brad Herman and Shiraz Akmal originally spun their work out of Dreamworks in 2015 and previously built out location-based VR attractions, like one for Terminator Salvation. But like the broader world, VR arcades everywhere started closing their doors in March following orders from governments seeking to slow the spread of COVID-19. That includes the Los Angeles location for Two Bit Circus, which features one of Spaces’ Terminator attractions. Underscoring the rapid shift in the wake of COVID-19, and its response, the venue originally planned to install a thermal camera to detect fevers in prospective visitors at the door, but closed fully within a few days. A survey in mid-March sent to operators of SpringboardVR, one of the leading platforms supplying VR arcades with content, showed that the vast majority of VR arcades were closing at least temporarily, with at least 16 percent closing their doors permanently starting in April.
But as out-of-home VR attractions ground to a halt, there’s now a greater need to connect to others through the Internet. There’s a robust debate about whether requiring a current generation VR headset makes sense to access social connection, but an optional add-on like Spaces might be a welcome break from the monotony of staring into a webcam in back-to-back Zoom meetings.
“We are fighting for our company, for our jobs, for our employees,” Herman wrote to me in explaining the rapid development effort. “Not going to let four years of work just vanish in the blink of an eye.”
Herman said they are planning additional environments and features for Spaces, including the ability to access multiple camera angles with the press of keyboard buttons. You can try out Spaces for free here.
Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published (usually) every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate. For today’s Community Download, we want to know if you’d rather meet up with colleagues, friends, and family in a Zoom or Zoom-equivalent video call, or in an actual immersive VR app?
With the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) around the globe, the prevalence of video conferencing has dramatically increased out of necessity. As governments implement social distancing guidelines and businesses close their physical locations to comply with shelter-in-place mandates, human contact is at an all-time low for many people in both professional and personal life.
Zoom, a free web-based video conferencing application, has exploded onto the scene as a popular choice for many people and businesses around the world. But what if there was another (better, arguably) way to meet up and talk with others?
Using VR headsets, or a mixture of VR and non-VR devices, there are multiple free apps out there that let users join up together online, exist in the same digital space, have meetings, socialize, and play games together.
We ran a Community Download not long ago looking for suggestions of the best VR games to play during quarantine too, as well as a virtual podcast discussion about remote work best practices you can check out if you’d like. In the meantime, one app that I personally suggest for meeting up with people in VR (or even just through a PC) is VRChat. It’s a lot like a virtual, social universe full of custom-made worlds to explore. Or if you want to share your screen and/or watch something with others, Bigscreen is perfect.
Let us know what you prefer: Meeting through a video conferencing service such as Zoom, or meeting up inside VR?
