After Apple CEO Tim Cook, it’s Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel’s turn to take on Facebook’s metaverse. At a conference organized by the Wall Street Journal on October 26, he said his app is more about augmented reality than the metaverse.
“The last thing I want to do when I get home from work after a long day is live inside a computer,” said the Snapchat co-founder. It is not the first time that he criticizes the Facebook metaverse, since last April he described it as “ambiguous and hypothetical” with the English newspaper. The Guardian. Internally, Snapchat even refuses to use the word “metavers.”
In late September, Snapchat announced that “250 million people interact with augmented reality on the app every day.” At the time, the social network made no secret of its ambitions to invest in a kind of metaverse.
Metaverse or augmented reality
At the moment, the company is developing augmented reality tools that would allow users to try on clothes virtually. As another example, Snapchat offers its pair of augmented reality glasses, Spectacle, which adds virtual filters to the real world.
Snapchat’s CEO isn’t the only one questioning Mark Zuckerberg’s vision. At the beginning of October, Tim Cook estimated that Facebook was on the wrong track because “the general public does not know what the metaverse is”, so it is difficult to imagine that this represents the future of human interactions. Facebook has still spent $15 billion on the metaverse since the start of their project.
Source: BFM TV
