Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has his home office in Metaverse.
According to Zuckerberg, workers can use the metaverse office to take “Messenger calls, read emails or work on your next big project.”
Meta’s Horizon is a group of three social VR apps that came last December. It includes Horizon Worlds (user-created experiences), Horizon Venues (sports and concerts), and Horizon Workrooms (work). They resemble 3D social playplaces, where users create their own avatars and interact with each other.
There are also apps for spreadsheets (Smartsheet), visual collaboration (MURAL), email (Spike), and VR versions of Dropbox and Slack.
If you want to know what it feels like to read your emails in VR, Lifewire took one for the team. While reading emails can become grating in the real world, the Quest 2 speedruns the experience and gets “uncomfortable after half an hour.” Spike’s VR app also lacks the ability to attach files to an email, a feature that has been available outside the metaverse since 1998.
“I really don’t see the point of it. Why would you need to do office work in a virtual world? It looks great for sure, but that’s about it,” wrote one user in the comments of Zuckerberg’s post.
IDC has reported that more than 11.2 million VR/AR headsets were sold in 2021, a 92.1 percent increase from the year prior. The newly rebranded Meta Quest 2 (formerly known as the Oculus Quest 2) hit stores this week. The Quest 2 is currently the world’s best-selling VR headset, but that could change when Sony, Apple, and other tech giants enter the space.
While we can’t know for sure how much Meta has spent developing digital cubicles specifically, the company plans to sink at least $10 billion in metaverse projects this year alone. For reference, WeWork went public at a valuation of $9 billion.