"The future is not so far away," Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the Californian group, said on Tuesday at a conference on the company's progress in building the metaverse, which is seen as the future of the internet.
In October 2021, the "Meta" group launched the metaverse, a new technology in which it has already invested some 10 billion dollars.
Admittedly, metavers has not yet been as successful as one might have expected, perhaps due to the limited functionality of its launch. This could change with new equipment such as the virtual reality (VR) headset -- the Quest Pro, a $1,500 tool for professionals -- but also many other gateways, via computers and smartphones. Avatars are coming to Instagram, and Meta is preparing bridges to Teams (Microsoft's collaboration software) and Peacock (NBCUniversal's video platform). By the end of 2021, more than 10 million Quest 2 headsets had been sold worldwide and more than $1.5 billion on the platform, and about a third of the 400 available titles have exceeded $1 million in sales.
"You need to be able to reach your friends in the metaverse wherever you are," said chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth. "We want everyone to be able to have the most immersive experience possible, but it's going to take a while before there are enough headsets."
As virtual reality improves, so do the apps, with the design getting closer and closer to the real thing. On the Quest Pro, internal cameras reproduce the user's facial expressions on the avatar's face.
The metaverse as an advertising platform:
Horizon Worlds, Meta's platform for VR creation and social interaction, is struggling to convince.
Despite the launch difficulties, we believe that metavers will gradually take hold as the smartphone is certain to be replaced by more intuitive methods such as VR, augmented reality or voice recognition.
But Meta is running out of steam. The group is facing bad economic times and competition from the ultra-popular TikTok, among others. And the other tech giants are also entering the metaverse. The market is hoping that Apple will release its first headset next year. "The metaverse is going to come as a surprise," assured Mark Rabkin, Meta's vice president of VR. "It's going to feel like it's a long way off, and then there are going to be compelling use cases, pockets of creators, sections of the population that will spend more time in it.
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