Video conferencing solved the basic problem of remote communication, but it created its own set of frustrations: the awkward eye contact, the flat grid of faces, the feeling of performing presence rather than inhabiting it. Spatial computing has been promising something better for years — actual presence, three-dimensional space, avatars that move and respond naturally. In 2026, two serious implementations exist: Meta Horizon Workrooms on Quest headsets, and the Persona feature built into Apple Vision Pro. They take very different approaches, and they’re suited to different kinds of teams.

Meta Horizon Workrooms

Meta’s remote collaboration platform puts participants in a shared virtual meeting room as customisable cartoon avatars. The avatars track your hand gestures (through Quest’s hand tracking) and head movements, giving a basic sense of embodied presence. You can use virtual whiteboards, screen-share your physical or virtual desktop into the space, and arrange seating like a physical meeting room.

The avatar style is deliberately stylised rather than photorealistic. This was a deliberate choice — realistic but not-quite-right avatars trigger uncanny valley responses, while clearly cartoon-ish avatars sidestep the problem. Meta’s avatars are expressive, customisable, and have improved substantially since the platform launched, but they look like avatars. Body tracking is limited to the upper body (head and hands), which means avatars don’t have natural-looking locomotion and are perceived as floating — present but incomplete.

What Workrooms does particularly well is spatial whiteboarding and shared virtual environments. Teams that need to diagram architecture, sketch UX flows, or work through visual problems together in real time find the virtual whiteboard genuinely useful. The ability to pin a shared screen into the virtual space, visible to everyone from their own spatial perspective, is meaningfully better than screensharing on a 2D video call.

Platform reach: This is Workrooms’ main advantage. Meta Quest headsets start at a price point accessible to enterprise budgets, and Workrooms is available free with a Quest. A team where everyone has a Quest can run virtual meetings with no hardware investment beyond the headsets. There’s also a 2D web browser mode for participants without headsets, though the experience is significantly reduced.

The practical limitation: Most enterprise users won’t wear a headset for a 45-minute meeting if they can avoid it. Headset fatigue is real, and the use case for Workrooms tends to be specific collaborative sessions — design reviews, workshops, standups that benefit from shared spatial context — rather than replacing every Zoom call. Teams that treat it as a supplement to traditional video conferencing rather than a replacement find more value.

Apple Vision Pro: Persona

Apple’s approach is philosophically opposite. Rather than representing you as an avatar, Vision Pro attempts to represent you as yourself — a photorealistic digital clone called a Persona.

The Persona is created by the headset’s cameras scanning your face. The result is a three-dimensional representation that captures your facial features, skin tone, hair, and eye movement. Critically, it tracks your expressions and eye contact in real time. When you look at someone in the call, your Persona looks at them. When you raise an eyebrow, the Persona does too.

The technical achievement is substantial. The eye-tracking fidelity and expression mapping are genuinely impressive, and for short interactions, Persona can feel close to looking at a real face on screen. Apple has continued improving the underlying model, and the 2026 generation is noticeably better than the 2024 launch.

The uncanny valley problem: Persona isn’t fully solved. The face floats in space without a body (the headset doesn’t track your torso or limbs), and even when the face looks right, the absence of a body reads as strange. Some users find their own Persona disconcerting. The rendering isn’t yet indistinguishable from a real face under close scrutiny.

FaceTime integration: Persona works through FaceTime, which means calls are device-to-device or through FaceTime group calls. It’s frictionless for Vision Pro to Vision Pro calls, and Vision Pro Personas appear in group FaceTime calls alongside iPhone and Mac participants who see them as 3D tiles. But it’s limited to Apple’s ecosystem — it doesn’t work in Zoom, Teams, or Meet without those platforms building Vision Pro-specific integration.

The SharePlay model: Apple’s XR collaboration model is built around SharePlay — the ability to share app experiences across a FaceTime call. If both participants have Vision Pro, they can watch the same spatial content together, annotate a shared document, or explore the same 3D model, each in their own physical space. For certain creative and technical workflows, this is compelling. For general enterprise collaboration, the ecosystem constraints limit it.

What Each Is Good For

Meta Horizon Workrooms is the practical choice for teams that need:

  • Cross-platform participation (some participants without headsets)
  • Active visual collaboration — whiteboarding, diagramming, working through design problems
  • A persistent virtual office space or meeting room
  • Quest-based headsets already in the team’s hardware estate

Apple Vision Pro Persona is compelling for:

  • One-to-one calls where presence and facial expression matter (sales, executive relationships, therapy, coaching)
  • Creative teams with Vision Pro headsets who work with shared spatial media
  • Workflows deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem

The honest assessment in 2026 is that both platforms are good for specific sessions and not ready to replace video conferencing for all remote communication. The hardware wear-time barrier is still significant. Most teams benefit from treating spatial meeting tools as high-value additions for the sessions where presence and shared spatial context really matter — rather than expecting them to replace the daily Zoom standup.

What has improved substantially is reliability and ease of entry. Both platforms have reduced the friction of joining and participating. The technology is good enough that the limiting factor is now team willingness to put on a headset, not platform capability.