At least digital humanoids don’t get Zoom fatigue—yet.

During the Meta Connect 2022 live keynote last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed his new plans for Meta to bring avatars—uncanny digital stand-ins for human workers—to video chats.

They would be customized to match a person’s exact skin tone, hairstyle, and outfit choices. According to Zuckerberg, an entirely virtual roundtable meeting would consist of you and your coworkers’ avatars chatting in something like a “third mode” between fully camera-on and camera-off.

“You can still express yourself and react, but you’re not on-camera, so it’s kind of like a better camera-off mode,” he said.

The social media giant invested $10 billion in building the metaverse last year, a digital space where users can interact with experiences and other people using VR technology. Zuckerberg revealed the video chat avatar feature in the key note after announcing partnerships with several companies, including one with Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella that would bring Microsoft apps to Meta Horizon Workrooms—the VR metaverse rooms where workers’ avatars meet—to create “a unified, digital office we think can make distributed work so much better.”

As Intelligencer’s John Herrman points out, all of this could be a strategy to diversify Meta’s business—but it could also be a play at acknowledging execs’ challenges with remote work and trying to rectify them. The opportunity for a “better camera-off mode” just might be an answered prayer for the bosses unhappy with the remote workers who tend to join meetings with their web cameras off.

Is seeing still believing?

Proximity bias, which describes bosses tending to prefer workers they can see in person, has long been proven. It also may explain why managers who are used to commandeering a physical office would be thrilled if they could see their workers—even if that required them to wear an elaborate headset that costs as much as a Peloton.