You Can Now Attend VR Meetings—No Headset Required

I shook hands with a stranger the other day. Even made a fist bump. Before you get your pitchforks out, this all happened virtually. I was in my Brooklyn living room, wearing sweatpants and a hoodie, and I tapped knuckles with Spatial's vice president of business development and strategy, who was standing in his own apartment 6 miles away. No hand sanitizer required.

Spatial is a startup that enables people to meet through augmented or virtual reality. It's a little similar to the now defunct Facebook Spaces, except it has much broader support. You can use VR or mixed-reality headsets from a myriad of brands—from Microsoft's HoloLens and Nreal's Light to the Oculus Quest—as vehicles to meet in virtual spaces.

So far, the experience has required everyone to jack in using a headset in order to join a meeting. Today however, Spatial is announcing that it's launching support for web browsers on desktops, Android, and iOS. Oh, and the platform is now completely free and open to everyone. "In light of Covid, we've actually had an intense amount of demand—about a 1,000 percent increase," Anand Agarawala, Spatial's CEO and cofounder, tells me in a beautiful virtual room filled with sunlight and surrounded by mountains. "Zoom is not a good replacement for being in the office with other people, whereas something like VR gives you that level of presence and personification."