After spending much of the past two years stuck in group video meetings, are the world’s office workers ready to take a big step further into the digital realm?

Microsoft this week outlined plans to introduce the 250m users of its Teams software to the more immersive virtual world known as the metaverse. Its move followed Facebook’s own vision for office meetings conducted in virtual reality, and came days after the social media company changed its name to Meta to reflect a broader corporate focus on virtual worlds.

Both companies said users would be able to create avatars, or animated cartoons of themselves, that would move freely between different virtual worlds. For workers, that means attending meetings, hanging out casually with colleagues or visiting “digital twins” of real-world offices and factories.