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During an earnings call in July, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg waxed eloquent about metaverse, its ambitious new initiative going so far as to recently say he wants Facebook to be primarily thought of as a metaverse company rather than a social media company. It's a concept that says one day we will all spend significant amounts of time in a fully immersive, digital space. Close on the heels with its announcements on metaverse, Facebook launched the open beta of Horizon Workrooms, the future of work from home and remote working - a VR workplace.

"The idea is like you go in wherever you are, you can have your perfect setup, you can have all your different monitors and people can stop in and collaborate quickly but it's really great for kind of focused work, and that will get better over time. The second area's around collaboration, which is really what this is focused on, which is, you know, the notion that, like, we shouldn't really have to physically be together to feel present or collaborate or brainstorm."

"And my sense is like what will happen is because we had Covid for 18 months and people were working remotely, we will have this kind of weird gap in the roadmaps () so, we talk about collaboration and communication, and I think this is better for a lot of those things as well, but the creativity piece is the thing I'm the most excited about, that you do have a place where, when we do our staff meetings in workrooms, we like hang out when we don't have an agenda because we still are chatting."

So, apparently, Facebook has been already using Horizon Workrooms internally for its meetings. Alex Heath is a senior reporter with the Verge and he had the chance to attend a press briefing in virtual reality where Mark Zuckerberg showed up to discuss Facebook's ambitions on the metaverse. Alex joins us to share with us his experience and his viewpoint.

So, you were there yourself to preview Facebook's open beta for the Oculus Quest called Horizon Workrooms. What did you think of the experience? Do you see it growing as a more immersive way to communicate with people who aren't in the sam physical space?

So, how does the app work? How does it pick up hand gestures and facial expressions? What about the Horizon Workshop impressed you the most?

As it's still the beta version, I'm sure there were some limitations and glitches during the meeting. What were some of the biggest challenges you or other participants faced as you took part in the meeting?

From your experience with this open beta app of Facebook, were you able to pick up the perks of conducting a meeting in the metaverse? What would you say are the benefits?

How do you see the future of metaverse meeting rooms such as Workrooms? Do you think it will be as useful as we hope it to be? Can it possibly replace Zoom for conference calls?

Do you think other companies will follow suit in creating metaverse meeting rooms as such or do you think it will be limited to only a select few tech companies like Facebook?

How long do you think it will take for this platform or similar sorts of metaverses to seep into our daily lives - or will it ever?

Alex Heath, senior reporter for the Verge, on his very own experience on Facebook's Horizon Workrooms. Thank you Alex for speaking with us tonight.