Horizon Workrooms review: nice, but not compelling for work yet
Some days ago, Facebook has surprisingly launched Horizon Workrooms, its solution to offer remote business meetings in virtual reality. The launch has been seasoned with the usual fluff about the metaverse and Zuckerberg has said that people at Facebook have already been using this product for their meetings for months. VR journalists have tried it in a dedicated meeting with the company and expressed generally positive opinions about it. But how actually is it? Is it possible to use it in place of Zoom as Zuck hints?
To discover all of this, I have tried Workrooms these days with the people at New Technology Walkers (especially with Massimiliano Ariani, that has helped me with this review) to do meetings and to work in VR. This way I’ve been able to experience it in an actual working context to understand if it is really the disruption that Zuck wants it to be. Here follows what has been my experience with it.
Horizon Workrooms features
Workrooms is a social VR experience to have business meetings. You can create a room for your team, and then you all join it and meet together in virtual reality. If someone has not a VR headset or is in mobility, he/she can join even just with the webcam, like with Zoom or Teams.
All the people in the room can talk each other and have so a chat. But they can also stand up from the desk and join a whiteboard (actually a blackboard) where they can write stuff with their controllers or import some images to do brainstorming around some ideas. Alternatively, people can also share their desktop on a big screen so that all the other people can see it. This is good for instance, for presentations.
Every person that is in VR has also the possibility of having his own screen in VR in private mode in front of him/her so that to keep working even when in VR. It is very useful for instance if you are following a presentation and you have to take notes on your PC, or if during the meeting you have to look up something on Google, or check out your e-mail inbox briefly.
Thanks to Workrooms, you can basically have meetings like in real life, even if people are physically distant from each other: you can be all together around a virtual table, everyone with his/her own PC, discussing some topic, or following a presentation. This is absolutely very interesting.
These are the main features of Horizon Workrooms. As you can see, at the moment, they are not that many, and other competitor software (e.g. Spatial) offer much more (e.g. Spatial can automatically caption and translate what the other people are saying). But this product has just launched in beta, and Facebook is a huge company, so we should see how it can evolve over time. But if we talk about the present, I can fairly say that it has a quite underwhelming set of features: one of the biggest lacking ones is that you can’t import 3D models.
When I talk about VR meetings, I always underline how meeting in VR has sense only if you need to exploit the physicality or the three-dimensionality of something: for instance, discussing around the prototype of a physical product, with all people of the distributed team meeting in VR so that they can analyze it from all the points of view; or having dance lessons where people need to use all the body; or entering all together in the virtual representation of a house in construction to see how the walls should be improved.
Well, Horizon Workrooms offer none of this, it just makes you meet and work at the same table with other people. Sometimes this can be useful, some others I think not. Zuck keeps saying that having a meeting in VR is like having it in real life, while using Zoom you forget the people you met with and you confuse who said what in which calls. Well, honestly for most meetings I personally don’t care having the sensation of having met that person, I just want to make the job done: and Zoom/Skype/Teams are more than enough for that. And if Workrooms wants to compete directly with videocall programs, it is destined to fail in the short term: they are much easier to use, more well-known, and work on every device easily. What Workrooms should implement is more spatial features, more functionalities that exploit all three dimensions. I hope this is going to happen in the next months: the software is still in beta, so we have to give it time to grow.
Today’s review is about what I can do nowadays in Workrooms, and today there aren’t in this program most of the reasons that give sense to a VR meeting. But I hope this may change in the next months.
Onboarding
When you develop a new experience, you should make the onboarding of new users the simplest possible, so that you don’t lose various customers in the onboarding process. Usually, you just ask for an e-mail or let people join as guests, or you require only one click: reducing friction is fundamental. But Facebook’s UX designers of Workrooms answered to this usual practice this way
Starting using Workrooms in VR is literally a pain in the a**. You have to download it on your Quest, then you launch it, and it forces you to set your desk area in VR. After that, it asks you to use your PC to create a Workrooms account. A Work…WHAT? I had already an Oculus account, then I have been forced to create a Facebook account to use the Quest 2, and you told me that it was necessary because “so we can leverage Facebook’s powerful platform for your life in VR”… and now I should create a separate account for this??? Why?? Facebook, you already have my data, so use your “powerful platform” and make my life easier…
After I created the account, I had to create my team. After that, I had to associate my headset with my account using a special code that I could see in VR. After that, I had to download and install the companion app to mirror my desktop in VR and configure it. At this point I could finally create a room for the company. In the end, I was ready to meet with my colleagues.
This process looks more difficult than winning Takeshi’s Castle. Let’s be honest: how many old business executives would be able to do all these operations alone? And especially how many of them have the willingness of doing it instead of just sending a link with Google Meet for which you need ONE CLICK? I think that Facebook has to rethink the onboarding process completely.
Your personal desk
After you have survived all this pain, you enter in VR inside your personal space, where you have a cozy desk in the middle of nothing. This space gave me some very good vibes because it reminded me a lot of the desk scene where you could test your Oculus Rift DK2 headset. It is of course made with much better graphics, and some things have changed, but it has a similar design, and this made me think a lot about the good old DK2 times, the Oculus startup, and all my passion for VR at that time. It was a pleasant moment of nostalgia.
This desk was like my personal office, through which I could use the UI of Workrooms to join one of the rooms of NTW. When I joined the room, I was again at a desk, this time bigger, and with other people around me. But in both environments there was one thing in common: I had my personal workspace that was the same in VR and in real life. And this is probably the thing that I loved the most about Horizon Workrooms, the genius idea that Facebook had.
When you are in Workrooms, you don’t vanish from your real environment to meet other people in XR, but you’re still at your desk, but with virtual people around you. You can still work as usual (or at least, this is the long-term vision), but together with other people that are not there physically with you.
When you launch Workrooms, as I’ve said, the operating system of the Quest tells you to set where is your desk in VR. After that, the program starts, and it puts the virtual desk exactly where your physical desk is. And your real working area on the desk becomes your virtual working area. Since you can mirror your desktop in a virtual display in front of you, and you can see your keyboard and mouse in a passthrough window (or you can see a virtual representation of your keyboard if you are one of the lucky guys of having a compatible keyboard), basically you find yourself in VR with the exact same setup that you have in real life: a desk, a screen in front of you, a mouse and a keyboard. And this virtual screen is private, so you can do what you want with it. Only if you want, you can project it on the big screen/blackboard so that all users can see it: this is for instance useful for presentations.
One of the biggest critics of VR meetings is that while in the meeting, you can only do the meeting, and are blocked from performing other tasks. In Workrooms you have exactly the same setup that you have in real life, and if you want to watch Nicki Minaj videos during a boring meeting, you can do that exactly as you do while in a Zoom call.
It is nice because the virtual world becomes an extension of your real working station. You can use it to work together with people that are distant from you: Max and I, the cofounders of NTW, are not in the same city in this period, and having the possibility of being again at the same virtual desk, with everyone working on his own PC at his own desk while being together in VR is great. Yes, there is other software that allows that, like Immersed or Bigscreen… but I think that Workrooms nails this better. You have your real workspace that gets transported in VR, where you are close to other people that have their own workspaces… this is overly cool.
Virtual desk issues
While I totally loved the idea of the virtual desk that matches the real desk, the sad truth is that at the moment this feature doesn’t work very well, and I’ve found it impractical. These are some of the issues that I’ve found:
- The passthrough has too low resolution to see the letters of the keyboard, so it is barely usable to put your fingers in the right position for touchtyping. If you can’t touchtype, you can’t use your PC in VR well, because you can’t read what letter you are typing
- If you can touchtype, you can’t use it the same, because there is a very noticeable lag between what you do with your mouse and keyboard and what happens on the virtual screen. Touchtyping is all about coordination between the hands and the eyes, and if the eyes see what the hands have done many letters ago, the brain gets crazy and you can’t touchtype properly anymore
- The mouse cursor may be slightly offset with regards to its real position, so you think you’re pressing a button but actually you’re not and viceversa
- Screen mirroring is not compatible with all the screens: Max has a very wide display he likes to flex about (like all creative people), and it was poorly mirrored in VR
- The mirroring app has continuous issues on my PC: sometimes it downgrades a lot the resolution and I see my display as painted with watercolors, other times, it just doesn’t mirror anything.
Long story short, I would never use it for my everyday job: especially the lag that prevents me from touchtyping is a total killer for me. Not to mention the fact that as a VR developer, I need my Quest to test the applications… and I can’t use Workrooms if I have to use my Quest to work. The good news is that all these issues (apart from the camera resolution) can be fixed by Facebook in future updates, making the situation better. But for now, it is good only for very short sessions.
Blackboard
There is a big shared blackboard that all the team can use. To respect this matching between the virtual and the real, that IMHO is the best feature of Workrooms, the blackboard must have a physical location in your room, too. When you try to virtually stand up for the first time to reach the blackboard, the operating system requires you to actually stand up and position a blackboard in your physical room, usually rotated 90° with respect to your orientation of when you are seated on your desk. This sense of physicality for the blackboard was a bit less cool for me, because while I have a real desk I can match with a virtual desk, I don’t have a real blackboard at home, so this sounds more gimmicky. But it’s not a bad idea, this way you know where you have one and where you have the other in your physical space.
On the blackboard, you can draw with colored markers and you can attach images. You can also delete or move things that are on it. At the moment I haven’t been able to do much more. As I said in the beginning, the features are pretty limited, and I would say also a bit disappointing if we compare these to the ones of other software (where you can add post-its, write texts with your keyboard, and draw shapes, for instance). The thing that I found the most obnoxious is that I can’t import the photos directly from the blackboard: I have to return to my desk and import them, or do that from a web portal from my PC, and then I can return back to the blackboard to use them. From a usability standpoint, this is terrible, because if I need to find some photos and use them, I have continuously to ask the software to sit me down on the desk and then put me again next to the blackboard, while also continuously standing up and sitting down in real life. It is good if you want to do fitness, terrible if you want to just have a meeting. In Spatial, I can just say a word with my voice and it automatically finds me the images about that word with a web search and then I can put them on the shared board. It’s far more usable.
That said, the features are limited but well made: for instance, you can draw without having to press any button on the controller, you just move the controller on the surface of the blackboard, and it draws. This is very comfortable. And the way you draw is just genius: you rotate the controller and hold the handle between your fingers as if it were a big pen, and you draw with it. I loved it because Facebook engineers have thought outside the box for this feature, and it also works quite well in giving the impression of having a real and virtual pen in your hands. The bad news is that the Oculus Touch controller is heavy, its handle is big, its big tracking ring doesn’t let you keep the controller in the pose you want, and the overall ergonomics of this solution are mediocre. It is not comfortable for the hand, and either your fingers or your wrist will feel fatigued if you do this for a long time. But it remains a cool idea nonetheless.
Also, the blackboard lacks a laser pointer or something else that you can use to point at some parts of the screen… this could be useful both for the blackboard and for the big screen sharing when you have to point something in particular you want to discuss about.
Max adds that he would like to have more blackboards… since you are in VR, it is limiting having only one place where you can write.
All in all, the blackboard does its job decently… it feels like a big blackboard in an office where people can draw what they want.
Desk Blackboard
To make things better, Facebook also gives you the opportunity of having a mini-blackboard on your desk. This way you don’t have to stand up and sit down all the time. Yes, it is much smaller, but it gets the job done anyway.
I think that the desk blackboard gives you maximum satisfaction when drawing with your controllers. On the desk, you draw always by holding your controller as a pen, and when you touch the surface of the desk, you write on the blackboard. This is much better than the above scenario for two reasons:
- Since you make the controller touch your desk, you don’t have to lift the whole weight of the controller, that so results less uncomfortable;
- You have the haptic feedback of the desk when you draw with the tip of the controller exactly as you would have it with a real marker, and this makes the experience more realistic.
I personally loved writing with my controller on my desk, it felt like magic.
But since this was too beautiful, Facebook UX designers have decided to ruin it by letting you choose between your virtual PC and the desk blackboard. The virtual PC and the virtual blackboard occupy the same position (in front of you), so if you are using your PC, to use the desk blackboard you have to physically move your laptop away. This is just nonsense to me because it makes me choose between two features that are actually both useful.
Rooms
The environment of the meetings is always a cozy office. Everything is in a cartoonish style, but they chose a mood that in my opinion is ok to work in: it doesn’t look like living inside a game, but it is just a working place. I appreciated a lot the environment because it is well made and it is especially relaxing. It is exactly what you would expect from Facebook: a perfect place, where everything is in order, and everyone is happy. On one side, I love it, because it is a place where I would like to go to work in peace. On the other side, I hate this kind of “perfect world”, and I prefer places that allow a bit of craziness like VRChat. When I watched Demolition Man, I was not rooting for Cocteau (also because of that thing about the bodily fluids), so this is not my style at all. But this fits Facebook narrative a lot, so this was to be expected.
The setup of the desk and the room can be changed depending on the kind of meeting (brainstorming vs workshop for instance), and you can easily change sit at the table. You can’t stand up and go around the office, though.
You can create many rooms within your organization, and have all the meetings that you want, with all the different setups that you prefer: for instance, you can keep a room for the meetings and another one for the workshops. Creating a room is very easy.
What I loved is that rooms are persistent. If I meet with my team today and then return back tomorrow, we still find there the same things written on the blackboard, and we can keep our brainstorming session. This is very handy and comes with no effort (no need to hit a “Save” button), and I think it can be very useful for people that want to use Workrooms every day.
Avatars
The system uses the new Facebook Avatars that I have already reviewed extensively in another post. I love that Facebook Avatars are highly inclusive, and I’m sure that everyone will be able to create an avatar that fits him/her. They are also well made, and I have to say that while I was scared they couldn’t fit well a business environment, after I have tried them I can testify they are not that bad for the purpose. Exactly like the environment, they don’t feel too much “fancy”: yes, they are cartoonish, but with a style that is serious, so it’s ok. I mean, in some serious contexts they wouldn’t fit well at all (I can’t imagine a meeting of G20 countries with the cartoonish avatars of the prime ministers talking about economy), but for meetings of young startups, they are ok-ish.
Avatars move the mouth to follow what the user is saying, and this adds some realism even if it feels a bit uncanny. They can move all the fingers of the hand when you use hand tracking. The movements of the arms and the torso are a bit clunky, but since the avatars are cartoonish, this doesn’t feel that bad.
What feels bad is that they don’t have feet or legs at all… or better, they don’t have the whole part of the body below the waist. This looks quite creepy… as long as you are all seated on the desks, it is ok, but if someone is standing, he/she looks creepy.
Another thing that many people have talked about in their reviews is the positional audio: you can hear the audio of every person coming exactly from the place his/her avatar is in. This increases the sense of copresence because you feel in a place together with other people, and their audio also feels like coming exactly from where you see they are. This is very well-made, even if I have to say my mind has not been blown: positional audio is something that we VR people have since a lot, so I can’t say I’m surprised.
I also found it interesting that the system tries to prevent weird poses of the avatars: if the users enter passthrough mode, or are doing some configurations, they become gray and you see them with the eyes closed as if they were meditating. One of the creepiest thing that happened to me in a VR meeting was being in a room with someone that was having problems with his Vive and so he was making some tests to make everything work, and I could see his avatar with the head inside the desk and the hands inside his body. These situations are very disturbing, and Horizon Workrooms always avoids this to happen: if something weird is happening, the avatar of that person closes his/her eyes and freezes. I think Facebook made a great job in solving this common problem of social VR experiences.
In general, I think that Workrooms provides the sense of copresence pretty well thanks to its avatars. I really had the impression of being virtually in the room with other people. It has been one of the things I liked the most of this software.
Moderation
Horizon is meant to meet people you already know (it is not VRChat), so it has not strong moderation tools (like VRChat). There are anyway some interesting solutions in this sense, and for instance, when you try to compenetrate another avatar, it becomes flat blue and semi-transparent: this way it is not possible to violate too much the personal space of another person, and harassing becomes less interesting for trolls.
Facebook makes everyone accept its code of conduct when joining Horizon Workrooms, and invites everyone to respect the others. This is also again perfectly in line with the cozy environment you are in. During my first meeting, I decided to respect this code line by line, and in fact, I started drawing giant penises on the blackboard (the time-to-penis has been like 2 seconds with me) while showing multiple middle fingers and cursing during the meeting with Max. Nothing happened, so this means that Facebook is not actively monitoring Workrooms spaces as it promised to do with the full Facebook Horizon where there are invisible mods that control that everything is going well. So as long as in your room everyone likes drawing penises, you can do that, provided that Mark doesn’t discover it. But if someone in the room doesn’t like that, you can be reported easily from within VR, and I guess your account can be suspended.
UI/UX
On the desk, you have a tiny menu that lets you do some operations, like changing the settings, uploading files to the blackboard, sharing your screen, etc… The menu is small and has quite limited features, but it is ok to use for most the operations. It is black with blue highlights: it has the same style as the Quest system menu.
You can interact with everything either with the hands and the controllers. The application invites the user to use the hands for everything because this way you have the hands free to use your keyboard and mouse and you don’t have continued to pick up your controllers. Also if you have your hands free, you can have better interactions with the other avatars, and feel more immersed in the virtual office.
This is all great in theory, but in practice, there are two problems:
- You can use the blackboard only with the controllers, so you can’t forget about them completely… especially if you have to switch often between your computer and the blackboard, this is a nuisance
- The interactions with the menus, if you use the hands, are clunky. For some reasons, the menus of the applications are meant to be operated only if the hand is close to them… but maybe the menu of the application is close to the monitor of my physical laptop, resulting in the fact that I have to move my hands close to my display to make them interact with the menu, but in that position the hands tracking performances degrades (because they are too close to another object), and so in the end I can’t interact properly with the menus. Menus are also quite small, so interacting them with the a-bit-shaky hands tracking is not ideal, either. Long story short: I prefer controllers to interact with UI.
Hands tracking is nice as along as you don’t have to use menus or blackboards. I personally loved to see my hands transitioning from the ones of the digital avatar to the real ones of the passthrough window while moving them over my keyboard.
Video connection
Horizon Workrooms supports up to 16 people in VR and 34 via video, for a total of 50 people in each room (that is more or less the industry standard). But honestly speaking, I would use video connection only as a backup plan if I can’t join in VR, because the experience when there is someone joining from outside VR is a bit subpar.
Have you ever had a meeting in real life when there was one person joining from Skype? Well, if you had, you know that this makes the whole meeting a bit clunky. In Horizon Workrooms, the real meeting is made by who is in VR, and the others are just an addition. If you join with your webcam, you have a single point of view of the room (you can also focus on the blackboard, though), and you can’t do anything apart from talking. There is a chat, and the possibility of uploading files from the web portal, but no one reads the chat, and it is not clear where it is possible to see the files that get shared. You can’t even write on the blackboard. So you are basically just a spectator that can at maximum comment via voice.
Who is in VR sees the video people as a videostream in a little panel that is installed next to the table.
The only advantage of meeting in Workrooms is the sense of copresence, but if you are in VR and the other person is in video, no one of you two has copresence, and at this point, it is better to meet over Zoom. I think that the ideal scenario is having either everyone via video on Zoom, or everyone in VR in Workrooms.
One good thing of Horizon rooms is that they can be joined by guests by simply sharing a link to that room. So if you are in VR with your colleagues, and you want to invite someone for a quick chat, you can send him/her a link, he/she can join on the fly by video and you can talk each other. This is very handy.
One last notice about rooms: you can’t join your room twice: if you join by video and you are already in VR, your VR avatar gets kicked out and you remain only as a video user.
Oculus Quest 2
Having meetings in VR is cool for the sense of presence, but the Zuckulus Quest 2 has its own shares of issues that complicate everything. For start, if you have the plain Quest 2, after 45 minutes you start feeling discomfort on your head, and you want to abandon the meeting. This could be a good thing, because we all hate meetings that go beyond 30 minutes (“VR pain” could be a good excuse to abandon the meeting), but on the other side, it is a problem if you wanted just to work in VR side by side with your remote colleagues.
Even if you survive the pain, the battery of the Quest drains pretty fast while you keep streaming your desktop, so if you don’t keep it connected to a charging unit or power bank will die well before two hours. I had to join the last part of a meeting via video because the Quest battery died.
There is also the problem of friction: if someone asks me to join a meeting, and my Quest is already on and it is next to me, joining it in Workrooms is a matter of seconds, so I do that in VR. But if my Quest is turned off, or it is another room, I find it more comfortable to join it via video, because joining it in VR would require too much friction to me, while joining a videocall is only a matter of clicking on one link. This is a huge problem for the daily usage of Workrooms by companies… because if everyone joins by video, at this point it is better to use Zoom directly.
Privacy
Facebook claims in its privacy policy that nothing of what you do or say in Workrooms is used to profile you. And you can trust them, because they never change their privacy polic… ah no.
Competition
As I’ve already said, I think that Horizon Workrooms has fewer features than all its direct competitors. It is very limited at the moment, but behind it has an enormous company like Facebook, so it can grow pretty fast in the future. I also think that it also appears much more polished than most of its competitors: it seems a product that has limited features, but has them implemented very well. This is for sure a big advantage.
What annoys me a bit is that again Facebook is competing against startup that are inside its ecosystem, and with this operation, it will make some of them to die. Workrooms is competing in a not completely fair way, proposing a product that is completely free, and using features that Facebook has embedded into the OS specifically for that. And Horizon Workrooms has been featured on all the most famous magazines thanks to Facebook’s powerful PR. How can a social VR startup compete with all of this? It can not, of course.
I think this is not good for the whole VR startups ecosystem.
Misc feedback
Other things I’ve noticed that didn’t fit the other paragraphs:
- The first popup with the introductory video gave me some motion sickness sensations
- Either the overall network management of the software feels poor, or the Workrooms servers are located in Antarctica: file uploads took ages to me, and when I try to share my screen from my PC, it needs a lot of time before the other people can start seeing it
- The virtual display that you have in front of you that mirrors your PC screen sometimes prevents you from seeing your colleagues that are behind it, and this is a bit annoying
- Facebook also talks about integrations with Google Calendar and Outlook to better organize meetings, but I haven’t tested this feature. It sounds amazing, though
- There are some bugs here and there still to be ironed out
Final impressions
Horizon Workrooms is too early to be judged, IMHO. It is a meeting application that gets some things right for sure: the sense of presence you have with the other people is very good; the ability to use your physical desk and computer as also your virtual workstation creates a sense of blend of the real and the virtual that I’ve personally found amazing; and it has also some genius features, like the ability of writing by holding your controllers like a pen. I had fun having meetings inside it.
But it looks to me at the moment a solution looking for a problem. It’s a nice demo, but it has almost no feature to make it compelling to me to join a meeting in VR. To perform most tasks, it is ok a videocall where you can use the chat to share links. And there are tools like Miro that already offer fantastic shared 2D whiteboards where creators can put all the materials that they find online. You would argue that this is a problem of all VR meeting tools, but the fact is that the other ones lets you interact with 3D models, while this one does not. So there is not a practical reason to meet in virtual reality. And competing against videocall tools at the moment is impossible for a VR experience, especially one in beta.
With Workrooms, you meet in VR just for the sake of meeting in VR, because you want to feel together with another person. And this is nice for sure, I would especially love feeling again at a desk with a colleague of mine instead of working alone. But the fatigue given by prolonged use of VR, plus the lag of the desktop streaming makes it very hard for me to work there.
I think that I will use it sometimes to work side by side with someone, maybe while doing some light tasks like reading the emails, but for most of the time I’ll still work alone on my PC and have Zoom/Telegram calls when needed. Maybe when Workrooms will add some features and will solve all its bugs, and a Quest Pro will make it more comfortable for me wearing a VR headset for 4 hours straight, I could consider Workrooms as a solid working environment. But I think it will need another year at minimum.
That’s it for this long review of Horizon Workrooms, that I hope can be useful for you all. Have you tried it? What are your impressions over it? Let me know in the comments!
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