The potential of the metaverse as a replacement for the traditional office even faces skepticism from Meta’s own employeesreveals a report, released days after the company officially unveiled its new Meta Quest Pro mixed reality device.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the company, you’re interested in your own employees adopting the technology you’re betting billions of dollars on. But his interest has turned into a failed wish.
The New York Times, quoted on the website of slashgearreports that the company discovered some issues after employees were instructed to conduct more metaverse-based meetings in the Horizon Workrooms app.
“Many” of Meta’s employees didn’t own one of Meta’s headsets, while others had a Quest but hadn’t bothered to set it up.
Lack of enthusiasm: Why?
The alleged lack of enthusiasm on the part of the Meta staff could be explained by another statistic the article cites. Of 1,000 employees surveyed by the Blind social network, a total of 420 said they did not understand the company’s “metaverse strategy”. That represents 42% of workers.
This case dovetails with reports from several months ago, which described the platform as riddled with quality issues and claimed that few employees enjoyed using it.
At the time, The Verge revealed that the vice president of Meta’s metaverse area, Vishal Shah, acknowledged that the platform had various bugs and stability issuesordering a “quality lock” until the obvious problems were resolved.
Shah, who is also one of the executives interested in Meta staff embracing one of the key selling points of the company’s metaverse, called weekly Horizon-based meetings.
According to the report, he stated: “Everyone in this organization should make it their mission to fall in love with Horizon Worlds. You can’t do that without using it. Get in there. Set up times to do it with your colleagues or friends, both internal builds and public builds so you can interact with our community”.