Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, spoke a few days ago with a journalist from The Guardian on the evolution of social networks and the hypothetical arrival of the metaverse. According to him, people will prefer to spend time in the real world, augmented of course, rather than in a totally virtual world.
Spiegel believes in augmented reality rather than virtual reality
In the short term, Evan Spiegel is therefore convinced that augmented reality will transform social networks much faster than virtual reality. He has been making this bet with Snapchat for several years now. Indeed, augmented reality is already very well integrated within the application. Last year, the social network even presented its augmented reality glasses. This new pair, a bit special, gives “augmented reality life”. It allows you to take advantage of augmented reality directly in your field of vision, which could be useful for brands. At this time, the latest Spectacles template is only available to creators and developers.
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What really differentiates Snapchat’s approach from Meta’s? The CEO of Snapchat took the time to explain his position which consists focus on experiences built for the real world rather than for the metaverse, which is totally virtual to it. Evan Spiegel believes that “the reason why we don’t use this word is that it is quite ambiguous and hypothetical. Just ask a room of people how to define it, and everyone’s definition will be totally different.”. According to him, the companies that express themselves on this subject “are really talking about something that does not yet exist”as opposed to augmented reality.
Unlike Zuckerberg, the CEO of Snapchat is betting on the real world
He opposes these two technologies because in 2022, augmented reality is actually used by 250 million people every day, just on Snapchat. The application offers more or less advanced experiences, simple wacky effects to more advanced shopping features. Spiegel and Zuckerberg therefore do not have the same vision of the future of social networks. The boss of Meta is betting on virtual reality, when the CEO of Snapchat is betting everything on augmented reality. However, the two men agree that augmented reality glasses will one day be very popular. Mark Zuckerberg even believes that they could replace smartphones in a few years.
On the other hand, if Mark Zuckerberg is convinced that holograms and virtual meeting rooms will soon take precedence over the real world, Evan Spiegel is betting on the opposite. He finds that people really enjoy spending time together in real life. He adds that “Computing and social networks can really improve this and help create new shared experiences”. According to him, we must spend most of our time in the real world “because it really is a wonderful place”.