Daily Meetings. Your company may have a fun name for it, like Stand-Up or Team Huddle. It's a necessary evil that most workplaces have to deal with. So imagine if you ever think, "Wow, I hate these meetings." Imagine having a similar meeting, but in the metaverse. It turns out that some companies have adopted this as their "virtual" reality (lol), but to no one's surprise, the meetings seem to be a mess.

Slate's report (opens in new tab) (via The Byte) (opens in new tab) addresses issues plaguing several metaverse offices, ranging from technical problems to employees not wanting to engage with technology at all.

A junior manager at Accenture, a technology consulting firm, shared with Slate her frustrating experience of simply holding meetings in a metaverse workspace. She had to remove her headset and retrieve a two-factor code from her phone, but the headset automatically went into sleep mode. Several of her colleagues missed the meeting due to difficulty accessing the room.

During a VR workplace rollout at Accenture. Accessibility issues surfaced for several employees. Some reported motion sickness when using the headsets, and others could not use all of them due to disabilities. However, the company has not given up on providing headsets to new employees.

The same employee told Slate that most of his co-workers do not use the headsets much, deriding the whole thing as a "low-fidelity Minecraft virtual happy hour."

Rahul Mehra, co-founder of Roadcast, an India-based automation company, said that "low Internet bandwidth speeds across South and Southeast Asia and lack of consistent and compatible software across different hardware brands" were He stated that this is a problem for his company. He also said that senior employees at his firm are simply unfamiliar with the technology; Mehra believes it is possible to use the Metaverse Office for recruiting interviews, and that incorporating this technology would make his firm appear "very progressive" with respect to the people it hires.

The article goes into Slate's own problems with the VR-at-work approach running into the same issues as others, such as colleagues forgetting to charge or update their headsets or having to share screens from their desktops for meetings.

David Stern, founder of Slate Group Supporting Cast, sent headsets to a handful of remote employees for meetings and the occasional VR hangout. He said, "I don't know if it's appropriate for meetings, especially if you're doing a lot of screen sharing to see someone's desktop," and said these virtual meetings would likely be better suited for "having open conversations and brainstorming." Stern acknowledged that most of the employee headsets are used for "socializing," and said, "I can't yet determine the productivity-centered use cases."

The most popular metaverse workplaces are Meta Horizon Workrooms (opens in new tab), which are part of the larger Horizon Worlds metaverse. (opens in new tab) Given the recent departure of John Carmack (opens in new tab) and the layoff of 11,000 employees in November, the Meta metaverse is in a very precarious state.

I can understand the appeal of virtual workspaces from a cost-saving perspective. On paper, it is cheaper to purchase headsets and have employees work on three virtual monitors than it is to lease office space and purchase actual monitors and various office equipment. However, if employees are having problems just trying to attend meetings in the Metaverse, it seems difficult to convince them to work through an entire shift while wearing the headset. I mean, Meta added a leg to Horizon (open in new tab) just a few months ago.