The beta test of Facebook's Horizon Workrooms app comes as many companies continue to work from home after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down physical workspaces and as a new variant is sweeping across the globe.
Facebook sees its latest launch as an early step toward building the futuristic "metaverse" that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has touted in recent weeks.
The world's largest social network has invested heavily in virtual and augmented reality, developing hardware such as its Oculus VR headsets, working on AR glasses and wristband technologies and buying a bevy of VR gaming studios, including BigBox VR.
Gaining dominance in this space, which Facebook bets will be the next big computing platform, will allow it to be less reliant in the future on other hardware makers, such as Apple Inc, the company has said.
Facebook's vice president of its Reality Labs group, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, said the new Workrooms app gives "a good sense" of how the company envisions elements of the metaverse.
"This is kind of one of those foundational steps in that direction," Bosworth told reporters during a VR news conference.
The term "metaverse," coined in the 1992 dystopian novel "Snow Crash," is used to describe immersive, shared spaces accessed across different platforms where the physical and digital converge. Zuckerberg has described it as an "embodied internet."
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