Do you love Zoom? But do you also miss that sweet, sweet feeling of sitting in an antiseptic conference room? Mark Zuckerberg has good news for you. The Facebook founder announced on Thursday that the company is launching something called a Horizon Workrooms app, which can be accessed through the Oculus Quest 2 virtual-reality headset. Strap in, and a magical transformation occurs. You become a cartoon, bobbing away in a cartoon office. Zuckerberg apparently considers this a step “toward building the metaverse,” CNBC reports.
As for what the metaverse might look like, well. Turn with me now to the Book of Revelation, chapter six, verse one: “And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.”
According to Wired, “Workrooms represents Facebook’s first public attempt to enable what Zuckerberg has called the ‘infinite office.’” The idea of an infinite office is bad enough. Worse, however, is an infinite office populated by entities who look as though they’re about to tell you that vaccines make you magnetic. The cartoon avatars bear an unfortunate resemblance to bitmoji avatars, which are often used by the most annoying people on the internet. (I’m sure there are exceptions. You may be one of them. Sorry!)
“I think it might be the most intense VR application that exists, in terms of how much we’re trying to put every bell and whistle from the headset into the experience you’re using,” Andrew Bosworth of Facebook told reporters. I’m not a tech reporter, but this doesn’t sound very pleasant. Never in my life have I gone to an office and thought, “If only this could become an intense VR application!”
Will the Workrooms app catch on? For our sake, I hope it does not. Seems a lot easier to just let people work from home and leave them alone.
