If the Metaverse idea expands beyond the goofy CGI-driven trickery seen through the goggles of an Oculus helmet, the idea of “being present” may change altogether over the coming years (though Zuckerberg’s half-decade timeline seems optimistic). “Five years from now, people will be able to live where they want and work from wherever they want but feel present when they do it,” he said.

The demo looks laughably underwhelming (the cartoonish avatars look like what would happen if Nintendo made an app called Wii Work), but it’s easy to see why management might flock to a gentle, brightly colored panoptic workplace where it’s impossible to escape the gaze of your boss, even in your own bedroom.Īccording to Zuckerberg, Horizon Workrooms is just a taste of what’s to come. Workrooms, Facebook’s attempt at trumping Zoom, is an immersive conference call program where coworkers don an Oculus VR helmet and share a virtual office space to, say, scribble notes on a digital whiteboard using hand gestures while their avatars mimic their own movements. “You can think about the Metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content - you are in it.”Īs part of his initial Metaverse media blitz, the Great Hoodied One appeared on CBS News last month to play show-and-tell with Horizon Workrooms and demonstrate what being “inside the internet” actually means. It’s “the successor to the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg told the Verge last month. If that’s vague, it’s because the Metaverse is an octopus with a nearly infinite number of arms and no single blueprint, which is why many are calling it the Web 3.0. The social media giant wants to morph into an all-consuming, all-encompassing platform with relationships, work, commerce, and entertainment commingling under one big tent.

In July, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is in the process of transitioning into a “Metaverse” company over the next half decade.

The lords of Silicon Valley are all done with earthly reality, but as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos arrange plans to physically leave, Zuckerberg wants to program a better earthly experience - one curated by Facebook. While his fellow tech CEOs try to usher in an era of mass interplanetary travel, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is dreaming of expansion not into outer space but cyberspace.

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