(RepublicanInformer.com)- We reported recently on how Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, is planning on turning his social media platform into a form of virtual reality that allows people to meet one another in a digital environment – and it looks like he’s making progress with those plans.
Last Thursday, Facebook announced plans to launch a new test run of its virtual-reality remote work application that utilized the Oculus Queens 2 headset.
Using the headset, which gives users a virtual visual and audio environment that makes them feel like they have been transported to a foreign environment, beta users can communicate in a “Facebook Horizon Workroom.” It shows other users in a cartoon format, sitting around desks and in a virtual office environment.
It’s like a Skype or Zoom call, but nobody looks like a real person.
Rather than just a novelty, Zuckerberg truly thinks that this is the next step in virtual working environment. And while users look like cartoons right now, the future could be something much more realistic.
Facebook describes it as the next step in creating a sort of “metaverse” – a way for people to interact on the internet in a way that feels much more normal and natural.
Andrew Bosworth – the vice president of Reality Labs group – the virtual reality wing of Facebook that works on the Oculus devices – said that the new Workrooms app gives people a “good sense” of how Facebook expects the metaverse to take shape.
And if you thought this all sounds dystopian and weird, that’s because it is. Zuckerberg took the term from “Snow Crash,” a dystopian novel from 1992 that describes a shared and immersive space across different platforms that merge digital and physical spaces.
Another term used by Zuckerberg to describe what his team is doing is an “embodied internet.”
In the first-ever VR news briefing by Facebook, the company showed how users on the app can design their own digital avatars who meet in virtual reality conference rooms. In the app, users not only see and hear one another, but can interact with a computer and desk right in front of them, share documents, and deliver presentations.
Facebook already controls what you say on social media, imagine if the company can decide what you can and can’t say during board meetings…
