In this blog in January, when we covered the news that Meta signed on fast food giant McDonald's as a customer for Workplace, the B2B service originally conceived as a Facebook for enterprises, we noted that Workplace the product had, curiously, been moved into a larger "Reality Labs" division to bring it closer to Meta's VR business. Today Meta is revealing some new moves that speak to that pivot: a set of enterprise services aimed at a new push to get businesses using its new, high-spec $1,499 Meta Quest Pro VR headsets in the workplace.

They include a new version of the company's Horizon Workrooms, and partnerships with Microsoft, Accenture, Adobe and Autodesk to build out more enterprise-ready and designer-ready VR services.

The pivot isn't out of the blue. It is no secret that businesses will likely be among the most likely - and if you're skeptical, perhaps one of the only - long-term customers of VR technology. Meta itself has already been taking some steps to building applications and experiences for them. (Although, of course, it's not quite carried through on all of them. Oculus for Business was sunset with the replacement, Quest for Business, today still only in a closed beta. "We learned a lot from that," was the main takeaway according to Micah Collins, director of Product Management for Meta's work products when I spoke to him yesterday.) Meanwhile, while Facebook's hardware has received good reviews, it's never really hit it out of the park with its consumer content for it. On the bright side, today's announcement by Meta that to-date $1.5 billion has been spent on Quest games and apps is one positive note in that consumer story.

Meanwhile, Facebook's other big enterprise effort, Workplace, has somewhat stalled in terms of natively developed product in recent years (a big integration with Microsoft's Teams signaled a focus on partners instead). So building more enterprise services for its device is the next logical step for Meta as it gets it new device into the world and looks for customers to buy and use it.

The core of that is the device itself. Meta shows how features such as high-contrast pancake optics and full-colour mixed reality find direct applications in the workplace firstly in viewing documents and working on mixed reality screens, but then also to be able to interact with a physical room. Much has been made fun of over the graphics previews Meta unveiled earlier this year, but for what it's worth, the company says it has facial recognition and eye-tracking improved to help create more realistic avatars-not necessarily anything that I imagine is the top priority of businesses, but nice to have.

More to the point, though, Meta is launching a more advanced Meta Horizon Workroom for collaborating with others in VR. These include the addition of breakout groups, "sticky notes" for whiteboards, multiple screens, Zoom integration, 3D modeling and "Magic Rooms," which let teams create rooms in VR of people from both remote and in-person environments. Notable for all of this being in one single platform but actually quite a lot of startups are building different permutations of these features for enterprise mixed-reality applications – Gravity Sketch, another one of many we covered. Focusing on Horizon Workrooms is a smart play, building off of strengths: The first version, when it launched in August 2021, was described by Lucas aptly as Meta finally making a good app for VR.

Meta's ever-closer relationship with Microsoft is an interesting complement to this. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, will take the stage today for a presentation with Mark Zuckerberg with him, to discuss more cooperation around VR services for enterprises. This will include bringing Teams and Windows 365 into Quest Pro; bringing Quest Pro avatars into Teams; but critically, it will also see integration of some of the other aspects of Microsoft's services, such as enterprise security and device management, brought into Meta's Quest Pro environment, an important aspect of getting more enterprises on board.

On that front, this is also where Meta's next big partnership will also figure strongly: The company is going to be working closer with Accenture as a bridge between Meta and enterprises, which rely on consultants and integrators to get tech embedded and operational. That has started with Accenture itself, which has disseminated 60,000 Quest 2 headsets to its own employees. It's numbers like that likely music to Meta's ears (and, in the case of VR, eyes, too).