Meta continues to invest billions in metaverse, despite persistent skepticism

A year after Facebook changed its name to Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made another attempt to dispel persistent skepticism about his vision for the future. The metaverse, the three-dimensional version of the internet, continues to occupy a central place in this, Zuckerberg emphasized in a presentation on Tuesday. And Meta continues to invest billions in the development of the metaverse.

In his one and a half hour pep talk Zuckerberg not only presented new products and applications for the metaverse, such as the improved virtual reality headset Quest Pro. He also emphasized that Meta is not alone in developing the metaverse. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella appeared alongside Zuckerberg to ensure that the Redmond software giant is “incredibly excited about the metaverse.”

In partnership, the two companies are working to bring office life, and meetings in particular, to the metaverse. Joining video meetings via Microsoft Teams should also be possible with the Quest Pro next year.

This headset also makes all Microsoft Office 365 products available to work with in virtual reality, so without physical desks, PCs or laptops. The price of the headset is at 1,499 dollars (1,688 euros) more than three times higher than the current headset from Meta, Quest 2 – a sign that Meta gives the business market a prominent role in bringing the metaverse to fruition.

The boost Zuckerberg sought to give confidence in the metaverse on Tuesday was aimed at its own workforce and consumers, as well as the stock market, where Meta lost 60 percent of its value last year. On Wednesday, Meta shares opened slightly lower on Wall Street.

The background to the lack of investor enthusiasm is that the company faces a range of problems. For many young users, the Meta platforms Instagram and Facebook are much less interesting than competitor TikTok. In the advertising market, Meta is also very bothered by the fact that Apple tightened the possibilities to protect your privacy on Apple devices last year.

Also read: These are Mark Zuckerberg’s Seven Plagues

Users of iPhones and iPads can now prevent platforms like Facebook, In-stagram, YouTube and Twitter from collecting personal information to sell ads based on it. That is a direct attack on Meta’s main source of income. Partly because of this, the company had to report a decrease in turnover this summer for the second quarter of this year – for the first time in its existence.

To illustrate his company’s innovations, Zuckerberg showed that the avatars, the cartoonish appearances that embody you as you move through the metaverse, have been improved. This should provide, in Zuckerberg’s words, “a deep sense of presence” in virtual reality. “Avatars will be central to the way we express ourselves in the future.”

The new VR goggles can permanently ‘look’ inwards, at the wearer’s face, so that a smile or a raised eyebrow immediately triggers the same expression on the avatar’s face. You do not need to enable that function. But a reviewer made himself into The Washington Post still concerned about privacy. Because if Meta knows which advertisement makes you laugh at what moment, or which scene in a movie or game makes you cry, then that information about our emotions can be monetized with advertisers or others.

no lower body

Until now, the avatars in the virtual world of Meta had no lower body. Developing credible locomotion for an avatar’s legs was very difficult, Zuckerberg explained. And if one element looks wooden, it detracts from the whole experience. That’s why the legless avatars floated through Horizon, Meta’s social platform for the metaverse.

But now, Zuckerberg was able to proudly report and show, the avatars on the platform can have credibly moving legs. The idea is that you can also use an avatar that resembles yourself on other platforms, such as WhatsApp.

The broader message of all this was: at Meta we dare to continue our efforts for concrete technological innovation, even if it costs billions and even if not everyone is yet convinced that a new virtual world like the metaverse will catch on, or even foresee. in a real need. Even among Meta’s own employees, there has been considerable skepticism about the metaverse in recent months, and therefore also about the direction of the company.

In a leaked email to staff, the head of the department responsible for the metaverse complained that so few colleagues are active in the metaverse. “If we’re not excited about it, how can we expect our users to be excited about it?” he wrote. Zuckerberg himself had hinted at employee dissatisfaction with his course at an internal meeting in June — those who didn’t like it could leave. “Probably there are a lot of people at our company who shouldn’t be there,” he was quoted as saying.

Possibly in response, more Meta employees are meeting in the meeting rooms of the metaverse, Horizon Workrooms, reported The New York Times this weekend. But that doesn’t always go well. A meeting that chief of technology Andrew Bosworth called at Horizon Workrooms earlier this year was plagued by so many technical problems that they decided to switch to video conferencing via Zoom.

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