The rise of video conferencing app is one of the by-products of the ongoing of Covid-19 pandemic. From Zoom to HouseParty, a slew of video calling applications have started to gain huge traction. Facebook is also joining the fray with Messenger Rooms and a bunch of new features for its existing platforms.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg further shed light on the vision behind the Messenger Rooms and the evolution of video conferencing application following the Covid-19 pandemic. In an interview to The Verge, Zuckerberg also talked about the possible inclusion of Virtual Reality in the ongoing trend of video conferencing.
“Clearly, there are a bunch of things that are kind of weird about just staring at a video screen. I did a management team meeting in VR earlier, when everyone was working from home. And even though VR is earlier in its development, and video presence is more mature, there’s something about the feeling of space. Like, we’re standing in a circle in a room, and I had a sense of like where Stan [Chudnovsky, head of Messenger] was standing, and the audio was coming from that direction. So there was something that felt a lot more real about that in a way. I do think that there are things that we’ll get to over time. Video presence is not the end of the line,” he told The Verge.
When asked about the shift to video conferencing app is a permanent or long term, Zuckerberg admitted that there’s “some kind of temporary peak now”. He also pointed out that the trend has been growing in the same direction for quite some time.
“When you have 700 million people a day doing something — and have been even before this started for some period — that’s not just a temporary thing. The trend was already going in that direction. And I think that this period will accelerate that permanently by a few years. But clearly we’re in a fairly extreme period right now,” he added.
As said earlier, video conferencing applications have become quite popular as people are staying indoors due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The rise of Zoom, albeit controversial, has forced the existing and new players to launch similar products. Microsoft has already enhanced its Teams whereas Google is also pushing its Meet aggressively. Facebook’s Messenger Rooms leverages the company’s existing ecosystem, which is quite massive in size, and offers Zoom-like features.
