Mark Zuckerberg’s Magic Room: What Making Virtual Reality Happens is the Future of Meetings, and How Seeing it Happens on a Phone

Zuckerberg’s not the only mark here. In addition, Microsoft bet on the outcome of the metaverse, which features the person in its iteration who lacks legs. In the past few years, a bunch of companies have hired their own ‘chief metaverse officer’, including Disney andProcter & Gamble. Meta placed its bet on the metaverse in a flash manner, changing its name, spending all that dough, and it wasn’t the only one who believed in the future of virtual worlds. Even writer Neal Stephenson, who coined the word metaverse in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, founded an actual metaverse company in 2022.

There are signs that Meta’s bet has placed it in a better position than its competitors. Outside estimates say that the company’s consumer V.R headset is the most popular on the market with more than 15 million sold. According to an estimate by Sensor Tower, its app has been installed on 21 million devices.

Meta said in February that its Horizon Worlds game had grown to roughly 300,000 monthly active users — an increase from a few months earlier, but minuscule in comparison with Facebook’s more than 2.9 billion monthly active users. The company declined to provide more up-to-date figures for Horizon Worlds.

In a video from 2021, the CEO described the metaverse as an embodied internet. His spiel here is the key to understanding a delusion animating the reportedly $800 billion market. “When I send my parents a video of my kids, they’ll feel like they’re in the moment with us, not peering through a little window,” he says, miming the act of holding a phone. “Instead of looking at a screen, you’re going to be in these experiences.” Screens, Zuckerberg explains, can’t deliver a “deep feeling of presence.” The metaverse, he says, can.

This could be awkward. The future of meetings, as Meta calls them, was described by CEO Mark Zuckerberg during his keynote address at the company’s annual convention for Virtual Reality developers. Meta says the Magic Room is intended to make collaborators feel equally present in a shared space no matter where they are or what tech they’re using. You can achieve this presence in virtual reality via your phone according to the company.

But in the clip Zuckerberg showed to illustrate this vision, the playing field seems far from level. A team of four people are working on a skateboard prototype. There were three of them at the table. Two people were in the actual room wearing headsets to view the imaginary objects via augmented reality. One, apparently working remotely, was present as a cartoon avatar that could manipulate the artificial objects. But the fourth participant was a second-class citizen of the metaverse, visible only as a face on a virtual monitor, numbly grinning while he watched others creating what looked like a fairly lame toy skateboard out of thin air. The three people hacking away at this project became giddy with their achievement, fist-bumping, dancing, and generally having a hoot. You would think that they would break out in an ensemble performance of the song. Meanwhile pathetic Zoom guy … looks on.

As much as we gripe about Zoom, one good thing about it is that it equalizes the power dynamic of meetings. Imagine being trapped in those little boxes while everybody else is virtually cavorting.

Is Meta expecting this to impress? It didn’t. Instead, the cheerful message about impending appendages was met with mockery. The legs couldn’t save the reputation of the company. Meta had spent $36 billion to morph into a metaverse company, to manifest an immersive, globally accessible virtual-reality world that runs permanently alongside this one. It’s a glitchy ghost town that is known as Horizon Worlds. The people who used it were children or creeps (even though they are not allowed). Not even Meta’s own employees took to it. There was one of the most powerful corporations out there pouring Bond-level resources into creation of its next tech project, and it appeared that the best it could have done was a Second Life imitation.

In the past few years, metaverse startups like Decentraland and the Sandbox grabbed venture capital interest by hyping themselves as hubs for a new NFT-fueled economy. Despite these companies’ hefty valuations, they have remained decidedly niche. (Refuting a third-party report that it had only 38 active users one day, Decentraland said it had an average of 8,000 daily active users—which is still tiny.) Why did he gamble with the viability of his business?

I’m a skeptics, to put it mildly. The term was commonly used without really referring to any specific technology and companies that promote it the most seem to be not very good at it. However, I’m open minded. I was willing to give it a go when my editor asked me to spend time during the holidays in the metaverse.

The idea was simple. Meta and other companies claim that their platforms are going to bring people together. The holidays are a good time to test this. It’s a time for social gatherings, often involving loved ones from other states or even countries. March 2020 is when new tech will have the chance to connect physically distant people. But the holidays are a close second.

The platform we decided to use was Meta’s Horizon Worlds. And it’s worth noting that this choice is a result of starting this experiment from the end. The goal of putting different people together in a virtual room might still be possible. We’ve spent a whole pandemic in Zoom calls and Discord parties and Animal Crossing.

Is Virtual Reality a Bad Idea? A Closer Look at eMarketer’s Next-to-Leading-Order Experiment

I asked them to help me with the experiment. I asked people my friends, partners and family. I asked people who were thousands of miles away, and I asked people who lived down the street. I spoke to people who were willing to try the experiment with me. It’s that no one could.

Though willingness was in short supply, as well. One friend in particular—someone I love dearly and won’t get to see for the holidays, in other words a perfect candidate for this experiment—said she’d be willing to help. Grudgingly. The idea wasn’t appealing on its own, though. “I feel like VR would just be a stark reminder that you’re not here.” Still, she agreed to try it out in principle—but she couldn’t because, like everyone else I knew, she didn’t own a headset.

I might not be alone, but I’m probably not alone. Hard data is a little hard to pin down—in part because many polls lump together owning a VR headset with merely using one—but one survey from eMarketer released in 2021 estimated that by this year, only 31.3 million people in the US would “experience VR content” once a month in VR. That’s not a virtual reality headset.