- When Mark Zuckerberg urged Meta to have virtual meetings, many staff didn't own VR headsets, per NYT.
- Meta staff rushed to buy headsets and set them up before managers realized, a source told the NYT.
Mark Zuckerberg pressed teams at Meta to organize and attend virtual meetings when many employees didn't have VR headsets, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
Zuckerberg told employees this year to have their meetings on Meta's Horizon Workrooms app, where people can come together as avatars in virtual workspaces, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.
Meta, formerly known as Facebook until last year, launched Horizon Workrooms in August 2021. To access Horizon Workrooms, people need to have the Meta Quest 2, the company's VR headset.
The source, who remained anonymous, told The Times that many Meta employees didn't have VR headsets this year or hadn't gotten around to setting them up. Those staff then had to rush to purchase headsets and register them before their managers realized, the source told The Times.
Meta increased the price of its Quest 2 by $100 in August, from $299 to $399. Quest 2 was first known as the Oculus Quest 2 when it launched in 2020, but Meta changed its name the following year to Meta Quest 2.
Meta didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, told The Times in a statement that it was easy to be a "cynic about new and innovative technology" but creating it was more difficult.
"That's what we're doing because we believe the metaverse is the future of computing," Stone told the newspaper.
The Times reported that it spoke to more than a dozen current and former staff at Meta who requested to remain anonymous and obtained internal communications for its article.
Included in the Times report was inside information from two employees who told the newspaper that some workers call important metaverse projects "make Mark happy," abbreviating it to "MMH."
It comes as internal memos obtained by The Verge suggest that employees weren't using Meta's Horizon Worlds app enough.
"Why don't we love the product we've built so much that we use it all the time," Meta's Metaverse vice president Vishal Shah wrote in the memo, per The Verge. "The simple truth is, if we don't love it, how can we expect our users to love it?"