Surrounded by the gray of towers and parking lots, Jacques, an anonymous executive in an anonymous office, dreams of bright bay windows overlooking a verdant landscape. Instead of 3 square meters allocated to him in his austere open space, he imagines a large room in which to accommodate his entire team, without having to push each other or put away the files lying around.
Launched in beta version in August 2021 by Facebook, Horizon Workrooms wants to make Jacques’ dream a virtual reality. Pillar of the metaverse of the American firm, this application offers a dematerialized workspace, in which employees move in the form of small avatars. Using a virtual reality headset and a joystick, they can write on the board, chat with their colleagues… all from home, comfortably installed in their living room.
Interconnected virtual spaces would be the way to break the loneliness of the teleworker and to make more concrete, so to speak, his belonging to the work collective. With this application close to the video game, Mark Zuckerberg dreams of competing with the heavyweights of videoconferencing. Back on the front of the stage with the explosion of telecommuting, the use of virtual reality at work is not new. IBM has spent millions of dollars in Second Life since the early 2000s, organizing giant meetings on the famous platform.
In 2020, the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC made a mark by launching the very first version of Vive Sync, a platform that allows meetings to be held by avatars in a virtual reality environment. The Covid-19 pandemic has opened up new horizons for these applications. In April 2020, nearly 6,600 avatars strolled through the pixelated aisles of the very first edition of the French trade show Laval Virtual, unsurprisingly dedicated to virtual and augmented reality.
Manifestation of Avatars
Stealink, Teamflow, MeetinVR… Today, solutions that provide companies with virtual offices have multiplied. The pundits of the videoconference feel the wind turning. Bill Gates, founder of computer giant Microsoft, said it himself: “In two or three years, I predict that most virtual meetings will move from camera image networks to 2D (…) to the metaverse”, in a note published in December 2021 on his blog.
During 2022, Microsoft should deploy its own “virtuoconferencing” solution, called Mesh for Teams, where employees will have the possibility of appearing as an avatar in Teams or in a virtual meeting space. For its part, Cisco, the American leader in Internet communication networks, announced in October 2021 that it will soon be possible to organize meetings on its WebEx tool in the form of a hologram.
You have 20.06% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.