A year after its transition from Facebook to Meta, the social media giant is scrambling to cultivate the flame of the metaverse beyond enthusiasts, promising more sophisticated gear, revenue for creators and legs for avatars.
“The future is not so far away,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the Californian group, on Tuesday during a conference on the company’s progress in building the metaverse, considered the future of the Internet.
“The tone was much more measured than a year ago, like a return to earth,” commented Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies. “They realized how complicated it was to create this world, and also maybe people don’t want to live in it 24 hours a day.”
In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was becoming Meta, which has already invested some $10 billion in these new technologies last year.
On Tuesday, the boss put forward a new virtual reality (VR) headset – the Quest Pro, a $1,500 tool intended for professionals – but also many other gateways, via computers and smartphones.
Avatars are going to invite themselves on Instagram, and Meta is preparing gateways with Teams (Microsoft’s collaboration software) and Peacock (the NBCUniversal channel’s video platform).
“You need to be able to join 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.”
– “Sensation” –
The parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp believes that the metaverse has begun to take shape, in particular thanks to video games and VR fitness applications. 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, and about a third of the 400 titles available have exceeded $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 representations “to create a real feeling of each other’s presence”, said one of them.
On the Quest Pro, internal cameras reproduce the user’s facial expressions on that of his avatar.
“Virtual reality is improving, apps too. But I don’t see the metaverse materializing as a common universe. It’s still only about individual experiences,” says Carolina Milanesi.
Mark Zuckerberg has as always insisted on the vocation of his company – world number two in : “to create links” between people.
But Horizon Worlds, Meta’s VR social creation and interaction platform, is struggling to convince.
“A lot of us don’t spend that much time on Horizon,” Vishal Shah, the group’s vice president of metaverse, wrote in a mid-September memo to employees, picked up by The Verge.
He reported unflattering feedback and wondered: “If we don’t love (the platform), how can we expect our users to love it?”
– “Surprise” –
Mark Zuckerberg has always warned that the metaverse will take years to emerge.
“The sector is in a phase of intense excitement, which will fall 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, such as VR, augmented reality or voice recognition,” he said. he adds.
The Quest Pro “is going to be a device for testing use cases” and then designing a consumer version, investor Jack Soslow tweeted on Tuesday.
But Meta is running out of breath. The group is facing the bad economic situation and competition from the ultra-popular TikTok, among others.
And the other tech giants are also coming to the metaverse. The market is hoping Apple will release its first headset next year.
“The metaverse is going to come by surprise,” assured Mark Rabkin, Meta’s vice president in charge of VR, during a briefing on Wednesday.
“We’re going to have the impression that it’s very far away, and then there are going to be convincing use cases, pockets of creators, sections of the population who will spend more time there (…) and everything suddenly we’ll be there.”