Facebook Remote VR Meetings Are Tip of Iceberg; A Q&A With Rec Room’s CEO

This morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched Horizon Workrooms, a way for Oculus users to hold meetings in VR. 

As the name suggests, it’s a sort of offshoot of Facebook’s Horizon platform, which has been in early development for about two years. Horizon’s goal is to be Facebook’s main social VR product. Think of Horizon as VR’s equivalent of the Facebook platform itself or Instagram, while Workrooms is more like an app like Zoom or Slack.

What’s the actual difference between the two? Horizon is being pitched as a more open-ended social app driven by user-made content, closer in concept to the metaverse idea Facebook hopes to help establish. You can use it to do things like build games and hang out with friends—similar to a few existing VR apps, including one featured later in today’s newsletter.