After reports from outlets like Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider suggested that Meta is “considering” a cut “as high as 30%” for its “metaverse” teams, Meta issued an official statement confirming “shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables”.
“Within our overall Reality Labs portfolio we are shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables given the momentum there,” the official statement read. “We aren’t planning any broader changes than that.”
Over the past year I’ve woken up to the fact that “VR” “the metaverse” and other terms I take for granted are really confusing to many people.
I talked to someone and told them all about what I do in VR, and after a while they were like, “so like, games? Like an Xbox?” And I realized they were not understanding that no, I had a VR headset on. I was immersed in the social activities I just told you about…
And with the metaverse word, a bunch of people are convinced Mark invented the term, and/or that it can only apply to Meta’s products.
Combine this with broad distrust and disinterest in Meta as a company, it paints a picture of the whole category being really misunderstood. I think the fact that Meta products are the only ones most people see information about in ads is part of the perception problem.
I hope Valve was interested in ads for the Steam Frame.
@MyOpinion@lemmy.today Yeah the correct takeaway isn’t that it’s dead. Firstly because even though they’re definitely by far the most significant player Meta isn’t the only company doing VR and secondly because they’re continuing to work on it…
But it does say something if they’re drastically cutting the budget and I found Bosworth’s statement partially unconvincing since he decided to pretend like it’s nothing.
