Parmy Olson, Columnist

Sorry, Zuckerberg, the Metaverse Won't Replace Zoom

The virtual conference room needs to die. VR is better used for fun and building relationships.

August 31, 2022 at 4:00 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

Your VR starter kit.
Photographer: UCG/Universal Images Group Editorial

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“Welcome, welcome!” My guide, Philip, waves at me from his seat in a virtual conference room, where he’s wearing a green shirt and sitting at a desk. I’m at Facebook’s Reality Labs headquarters in Burlingame, California, wearing Meta Platform Inc.’s Quest 2 headset. Philip is in another room there as his cartoonish-looking avatar hops to another seat using a button on his virtual dashboard.

“You may have noticed when I changed seats that you heard me a little louder and a little closer in your left ear,” he says, noticeably more loudly and to-the-left-of-me than before. I jump to a different seat too.