San Francisco (AFP)
A year after changing the name of the parent network from Facebook to Meta, the giant group is striving to expand the momentum around Metaverse, beyond enthusiasts of this parallel virtual world, promising more advanced hardware, financial revenue for content creators, and improvements to avatars.
“The future is not very far,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the giant American group, last Tuesday, during a conference on the company’s progress in building the world of “Metaverse”, which is described as the future of the “internet”. Commenting on these statements, Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies said: “The tone was more deliberate than last year, like a return to reality.”
“They realized the complexity of creating this world, and they probably concluded that people don’t want to live in it around the clock,” she added.
In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced the change of the name of the parent network from “Facebook” to “Meta”. The group invested about $10 billion in these new technologies last year.
Last Tuesday, Zuckerberg launched a new virtual reality helmet called “Quest Pro”, a $1,500 tool intended for professionals, in addition to many other products that can be used through computers and smartphones. The user’s virtual avatar will enter Instagram, and Meta is preparing areas for cooperation with Microsoft’s Teams service and Peacock (the video platform of NBC Universal).
“You should be able to join your friends in Metaverse wherever you are,” said CTO Andrew Bosworth. “We want everyone to be able to have the most immersive experience possible, but it will take some time before there are enough helmets. ».
The parent company of “Facebook”, “Instagram” and “WhatsApp” see that the world of “Metaverse” is beginning to take shape, especially thanks to video games and virtual reality applications dedicated to fitness.
By the end of 2021, more than 10 million Quest 2 helmets had been sold worldwide, according to Counterpoint.
According to Meta, users have spent more than $1.5 billion on the platform so far, and nearly a third of the products available for sale in this area have crossed the $1 million threshold in sales.
On the innovation side, more realistic virtual user characters are on the way. These characters are soon expected to have legs, and the group’s engineers are working on realistic representations “to create a real sense of the presence of the Other,” according to one of those engineers.
In Quest Pro, indoor cameras reproduce the user’s facial expressions on their virtual character.
“Virtual reality is getting better, and applications are getting better,” said Carolina Milanesi. But I don’t see that metaverse will materialize as a common world. It’s still just individual experiences.”
Mark Zuckerberg, as always, stressed the mission of his company, the second in the world in , to “create connections” between people.
However, Horizon Worlds, the Meta platform specialized in the creation and social interaction of virtual reality, is finding it difficult to convince the feasibility of its activity.
“Many of us don’t spend much time in Horizon,” Vishal Shah, Vice President of Metaverse Affairs at Meta, wrote in a mid-September memo to employees and published by The Verge.
He spoke about indifferent comments about this platform, asking: “If we do not like (the platform), how can we expect our users to like it?”