Zuckerberg urges Meta employees to use VR for meetings

Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg), CEO of Facebook's parent company Meta, urged company employees to hold virtual reality headsets for online meetings, as a result, many employees had to rush to buy the device.

The Horizon Workrooms app, owned by Meta, will go live in March 2021, allowing users to communicate with avatars in virtual workspaces. This year, Zuckerberg asked employees to hold meetings through the Horizon Workrooms app, a person familiar with the matter said. But access to the Horizon Workrooms app requires possession of the company's virtual reality headset, the Meta Quest 2.

Many of Meta's employees had not previously used virtual reality headsets and didn't have the time to set them up, the sources said. After Zuckerberg's request, the employees had to buy equipment and register it before supervisors found out.

In August, Meta raised the price of the Quest 2 from $299 to $399. Quest 2 was released in 2020 and was originally called Oculus Quest 2, but Meta changed its name to Meta Quest 2 in 2021.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Meta spokesman Andy Stone previously said in a statement that it's easy to "be skeptical of new technologies" but harder to develop them.

"That's what we're doing because we firmly believe that the metaverse is the future of computing," Stone said.

Two Meta employees said some employees within the company referred to important Metaverse projects as "Make Mark Happy," abbreviated as "MMH (Make Mark Happy)."

Internal memos show that Meta employees don't have high usage of the Horizon Worlds metaverse app.

"Why can't we love what we build and keep using it," Vishal Shah, Meta's vice president of Metaverse, reportedly wrote in the memo. "The simple fact is that if we Don't like it, how can we expect our users to like it?"