Oculus Quest 2’s ‘Infinite Office’ Enables You to Create a Mixed Reality Workspace
A new virtual office experience for the work from home community unveiled which should make WFL a little more immersive.
Facebook’s new Oculus Quest 2 headset will have ‘Infinite Office’ features aimed at creating your own perfect virtual workspace. This was revealed during this week’s Facebook Connect conference. The feature enables you to personalize your own mixed reality workspace complete with a physical Logitech K830 keyboard through the use of Passthrough technology. For the work from home (WFH) crowd, this will have some real-world use-cases and implications.
The Infinite Office consists of a collection of work-focused features hat you can use to create your virtual workspace for real productivity.
From the trailer shown during the Facebook Connect, the Infinite Office looks like an evolution of the Quest interface that we have currently which was unveiled as an experimental feature in March this year and which is now the default interface.
Quest uses a Chromium-based built-in Oculus Browser that is compatible with various web-based apps and websites. The browser also has multi-window support which was rolled out this year and Facebook now appears to be pitching it as a Chromebook alternative.
The earliest previews of the Infinite Office showed it display programs streamed from the user’s Windows PC but this does not appear in the trailer released this week.
Users are already able to set up their Oculus Quest headsets to show Passthrough+ with the real world displayed through black and white cameras, instead of displaying the virtual home environment. The trailer seen this week shows a new slider for passthrough and allows the user to adjust how much of the real world they’d like to show, akin to how you’d use a slider to adjust opacity in an image.
Using Infinite Office, a user can wear a VR headset and they will be immersed into a virtual office space that they scale up as they wish. Users are even able to add multiple customizable virtual screens mimicking multiple monitor setup. Facebook is already partnering with Spatial on experiments on experiments incorporating Infinite Office with the virtual collaboration platform. The video below shows how Spatial works with the Passthrough.
The Passthrough mode will enable you to toggle between a fully immersive and a mixed reality experience. Typing has also traditionally been a huge problem in virtual reality and Facebook partnered with Logitech to bring its K830 keyboard into the virtual environment. Users will be able to pair up the real keyboard with Quest 2 and actually see it in the virtual environment via the headset. They will even be able to see their hands typing on the keyboard in virtual reality!
The Oculus Browser’s trackpad is also getting supported to allow users to more precisely manipulate content.
Facebook is planning to launch Infinite Office features via an experimental release for Oculus Quest 2 this winter. It is also promising to open up the Passthrough technology to developers. For the time being, there aren’t any plans to support Oculus for business.
https://virtualrealitytimes.com/2020/09/19/oculus-quest-2s-infinite-office-enables-you-to-create-a-mixed-reality-workspace/Mixed RealityTechnologyA new virtual office experience for the work from home community unveiled which should make WFL a little more immersive. Facebook’s new Oculus Quest 2 headset will have ‘Infinite Office’ features aimed at creating your own perfect virtual workspace. This was revealed during this week’s Facebook Connect conference. The feature...Sam OchanjiSam Ochanji[email protected]EditorVirtual Reality Times - Metaverse & VR