Horizon Workrooms — Virtual Presence experience with a lot of practicality
It’s been a little over four weeks since facebook released Horizon Workrooms beta, and I’ve been able to clock some productivity time in the app — typing up this article as well as a few meetings and peer programming sessions. I figured it’s time to do a small write up on the experience so far.
Why is this different from other options I’ve used?
Practical Keyboard tracking!
I’ve used quite a few collaboration VR apps over the last year or more, however it’s really never felt totally productive. Taking notes or getting input into the virtual room quickly felt clunky using existing VR keyboards. Even with apps attempting to map the VR keyboard to your actual keyboard, they just never gave an accurate enough experience to be practical, at least for my teams.
Solution? - accurate keyboard tracking + passthrough to show your actual hands while typing + visual cues when you hit the correct key.
This combo first appeared a few months back when Oculus released native keyboard tracking as an experimental feature with the Logitech K830. I purchased a K830 the same day! This felt like a game changer, however, it was limited to only being able to be used with the built in Oculus browser and not in any third party productivity apps. Due to this, it was more of a teaser than something that would be practical.
So, we had all the parts to the puzzle — great keyboard experience and great apps to allow collaboration and remote desktop functionality — but they needed to be combined correctly. Here’s where Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms shines, we finally got the combination I’ve been hoping for. Though, far from perfect, its already allowed me to clock some productive time doing meetings and peer programming sessions.
The ‘not so good’ — it’s still in beta and it shows!
While the experience is solid enough to allow productivity, its beta status is evident while using it. Here’s some issues I’ve encountered so far.
Keyboard Tracking can do with some work
I’ve found the typing experience with the K830 in the native Oculus browser to be extremely fluid with an almost natural feel. I’m unsure if this is the same technology ported or exposed to the Horizon Workrooms app, but I feel like the experience with the keyboard tracking in Workrooms is a little less natural. This is largely due to the missing cues when a key is hit as well as the sometimes buggy passthrough of hands when typing.
Connection Issues
I’ve also noticed that meetings that run more than 10 mins seems to suffer from some connection issues where members go dark and need to log back on into the room.
Some patience required with initial setup
Initial setup workflow seems a bit confusing and buggy. I’ve had a few team members have issues their initial try, including myself!
Remote Desktop experience needs a bit of clean up
Remote Desktop setup is buggy and usually results in a few restarts of the computer and Oculus app before it kicks in for a meeting.
The Remote Desktop connection also seems laggy compared to other VR remote connections I’ve used, sometimes resulting in complete disconnection.
Overall thoughts?
While definitely a beta and may not be ready for mission critical usage, I think tech enthusiasts will still find this a productive experience. I do even see this working well for peer programming sessions — once members are a bit forgiving.
None of the gaps I’ve experience seemed like a dealbreaker for me, though it did cost us some productivity time. All expected in a beta app I’d say.
I’m definitely going to keep using it with a select set of team members, BUT I will also be waiting with much anticipation of improvements and wider functionality in the future.
Overall I’d rate it as the best collaborative VR experience I’ve worked with and worth checking out especially if keyboard usage is a big part of your productivity.