The Ask
Provide technical and film support covering the launch of Horizon Workrooms, Reality Lab's flagship collaboration experience that lets people come together to work in the same virtual room, regardless of physical distance, across both virtual reality and the web. Workrooms is a big milestone in bringing the metaverse to life.
The Challenge
Going big with the news: The first step was to have Mark conduct his first interview in VR with Gayle King, which would air on CBS the morning of April 19. Next was covering 8+ hours of press demos back to back, involving more than 30 news outlets. Last was capturing a roundtable conversation between Mark, Boz and a number of VR creators.
We had three major technical hurdles to overcome with our Quest 2 headsets: managing heat, footage stabilization, and recording length. Our team of 3 camera operators removed the front plates of our headsets for better heat dispersion, mounted our headsets to tripods for steady footage, and staggered our recordings in increments of 10 minutes each to ensure every moment was captured.
The Impact
Coverage from reporters was straightforward to positive, highlighting the feeling of social presence they experienced in Workrooms and the potential for this app to unlock new VR opportunities. There were a number of positive mentions of our privacy guarantees, and several reporters have said this is our best attempt at social VR yet.