Meta abruptly pulls the plug on the virtual work environment Horizon Workrooms. Little seems to remain of the original Metaverse dream.
In a brief announcement, Meta announces that it will close the doors of Horizon Workrooms. This will happen soon, on February 16 to be precise. According to Meta, it is no longer necessary to offer Workrooms as a stand-alone application. Some functionalities of the platform will be incorporated into Meta Horizons or integrations with Teams and Zoom.
Meta launched the app in late 2021 as part of its virtual ‘Metaverse’ world Horizon Worlds. Zuckerberg still fully believed in his dream at the time: he changed the name of his company from Facebook to Meta that same year. Horizon Workrooms was intended as a virtual office where you could walk around, meet, or have a virtual coffee with your colleagues.
In 2021, there may still have been a demand for this when the world was in lockdown during the corona pandemic, but now most people prefer to drink real coffee in a physical office. A concept like Horizon Workrooms has therefore lost much of its relevance. Moreover, it was not popular even among its own employees.
What about the Metaverse?
The discontinuation of Horizon Workrooms is not an isolated decision by Meta. The ‘XR’ department Reality Labs is being heavily cut back: at least a thousand employees will be thanked for their services. Meta is also discontinuing the ‘as-a-service’ package for its Meta Quest headsets for businesses.
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In the statement, Meta declares that it is not completely abandoning the Metaverse. But the focus is shifting from immersive headsets to smartphones and wearables. Of Zuckerberg’s original dream in which we would all walk around in a virtual world, little seems to remain in early 2026.