A year after its transition from Facebook to Meta, the social media giant is striving to cultivate the flame of the metaverse beyond enthusiasts, promising fancier gear, revenue for creators and legs for avatars.
“The future is not so far away,” Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the Californian group, said Tuesday during a conference on the company’s progress in building the metaverse, considered the future of the Internet.
“The tone was much more restrained than a year ago, like a return to earth,” said Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies. “They realized how complicated it was to create this world, and also that maybe people don’t want to live in it 24 hours a day.”
In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was becoming Meta, having already invested some $10 billion in these new technologies last year. With the additional 5,000 million losses for the dedicated division of it, the expenses to develop this universe in 3D thus amount to 15,000 million dollars, underlines Business Insider.
On Tuesday, the boss highlighted a new virtual reality (VR) headset, the Quest Pro, a $1,500 tool for professionals, but also many other gateways, via computers and smartphones.
Avatars are going to self-invite on Instagram, and Meta is preparing catwalks with Teams (Microsoft’s collaboration software) and Peacock (NBCUniversal’s video platform).
“You should be able to join your friends in the metaverse wherever you are,” said Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer. “We want everyone to be able to have the most immersive experience possible, but it will be a while before there are enough headsets.”
The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp believes that the metaverse has started to take shape, thanks in particular to video games and VR fitness apps. By the end of 2021, more than 10 million Quest 2 headsets had been sold worldwide, according to Counterpoint.
According to Meta, users have spent more than $1.5 billion on the platform so far, with about a third of the 400 titles available having surpassed $1 million in sales.
On the innovation side, more realistic avatars are on the way. They should soon have legs, and the group’s engineers are working on photorealistic renderings “to create a real sense of each other’s presence,” one of them said.
In Quest Pro, the internal cameras reproduce the user’s facial expressions in that of their avatar.
Mark Zuckerberg has insisted as always on the vocation of his company, world number two in advertising: “create links” between people. But Horizon Worlds, Meta’s VR social interaction and creation platform, is struggling to convince.
“A lot of us don’t spend that much time at Horizon,” Vishal Shah, the group’s metaverse vice president, wrote in a mid-September memo to employees, picked up by The Verge.
He reported unflattering comments, wondering, “If we don’t love (the platform), how can we expect our users to love it?”
Mark Zuckerberg has always warned that the metaverse will take years to emerge. “The industry is in a phase of intense excitement, which will drop again in about a year,” predicts Rolf Illenberger, founder of VRdirect, a virtual reality consulting company.
“It’s a normal cycle for any technology. But the smartphone is going to be replaced, that’s for sure, by more intuitive methods, like VR, augmented reality or voice recognition,” he said, adding.
The Quest Pro “is going to be a device to test use cases” and then design a consumer version, investor Jack Soslow tweeted Tuesday. But Meta is running out of breath. The group faces the poor economic situation and competition from the ultra-popular TikTok, among others.
“We’re going to get the impression that it’s a long way off, and then there’s going to be compelling use cases, creator pools, sections of the population spending more time there…and all of a sudden us.” I’ll be there”.
Source: BFM TV
