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 fans of this parallel virtual world, promising more advanced hardware, financial income for content creators. and avatar improvements.
“The future is not far off,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the American giant, last Tuesday during a conference on the company’s progress in building the world of the “Metaverse”, which is described as the future of the “internet”. Commenting on these statements, Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies said: “The tone was more decisive than last year, like a return to reality”.
“They realized the complexity of creating this world and probably concluded that people don’t want to live in it all day,” he added.
In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced the change of the name of the parent network from “Facebook” to “Meta”. The group invested approximately $ 10 billion in these new technologies last year.
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg launched a new virtual reality helmet called “Quest Pro,” a $ 1,500 tool aimed at professionals, as well as many other products that can be used via 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 (NBC Universal’s video platform).
“You should be able to join your friends on the Metaverse wherever you are,” said CTO Andrew Bosworth. “We want everyone 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” sees that the world of “Metaverse” is starting 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 so far spent more than $ 1.5 billion on the platform, and nearly a third of the products available for sale in this area have passed the $ 1 million mark in sales.
As for innovation, more realistic virtual user characters are coming. These characters are expected to have legs soon, and the group’s architects are working on realistic representations “to create a true 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 his virtual character.
“Virtual reality is improving and applications are improving,” said Carolina Milanesi. But I don’t see that the metaverse will materialize as a common world. They are still just individual experiences “.
Mark Zuckerberg, as always, underlined the mission of his company, the second in the world for advertising, to “create connections” between people.
However, Horizon Worlds, the Meta platform specializing in the creation and social interaction of virtual reality, struggles to convince the feasibility of its business.
“Many of us don’t spend much time on Horizon,” wrote Vishal Shah, Meta’s Vice President of Metaverse Affairs, in a mid-September note to employees published by The Verge.
He spoke of indifferent comments about this platform, asking, “If we don’t like (the platform), how can we expect our users to like it?”
