Wendy’s has opened a virtual reality restaurant in the metaverse, a NJ.com report said Wednesday (April 13).

The fast-food chain has partnered with Meta’s Horizon Worlds to offer the new virtual restaurant, which debuted April 2. The Wendyverse, as it’s called, comes with a virtual reality Wendy’s website where players can meet up with friends, along with a virtual reality basketball court letting players shoot hoops.

It’s accessible to those who have a Meta Quest 2, though those without that can access it as an online viewer-only version.

Wendy’s operates over 6,500 physical restaurants around the world. It’s not likely to be the only restaurant to get into the metaverse’s collection of digital VR experiences.

Metaverse projects have become more popular since last October, when Facebook rebranded its company name to Meta, and began to focus more on the prospects of the virtual world.

“The full vision of metaverse may be years away, but brands should start experimenting on what their metaverse presence will be now,” Vishal Shah, Meta’s vice president of metaverse said. “There are experiences like Horizon Worlds which can give people a feeling of what it means to be together in an experience — it’s a great place to start.”

PYMNTS wrote that Wendy’s has partnered with Google Cloud to offer a new suite of data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and more, which will help to offer new services to stand out in the quick-service restaurant space.

The partnership might come along with the use of Google Cloud’s BigQuery data warehouse, and the Looker data analysis product, which would use cloud AI to improve ordering.

The report notes that restaurants are much more digital than they were even just a few years ago. The pandemic brought on a flux of ghost kitchens where restaurants operated kitchens solely for digital ordering, with no consumer facing presence.

And there have been new contactless tools, like QR codes, which are now widely used in restaurants.

Source: https://www.pymnts.com/metaverse/2022/wendys-opens-virtual-restaurant-in-metas-metaverse/