Mark Zuckerberg embraced the digital world known as the Metaverse when he announced that his company would change its name from Facebook to Meta in November 2021.
A month later, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said, I have written He said he believes that within a few years most virtual meetings will move from the two-dimensional grid of video to “the Metaverse, a 3D space with digital avatars.”
Shortly after, Microsoft announced a $70 billion investment to acquire video game giant Activision Blizzard, saying the deal “provides building blocks for the Metaverse.”
But since then, interest in the Metaverse has stalled. Technology investors are shifting to new trends such as artificial intelligence. And companies like Disney and Microsoft have canceled some metaverse projects, despite their explosive enthusiasm.
Enter apple. At the Worldwide Developers Conference starting Monday, the tech giant is expected to debut a virtual reality hardware product — high-tech goggles that blend the digital and physical worlds.
The company believes it can entice consumers with mixed reality products that outperform the poorly selling high-end Quest Pro headset Meta, and spark mainstream interest in virtual reality in a way others haven’t. I’m betting on what I can do. Apple’s headsets are expected to cost about $3,000 and look like ski goggles, according to current and former employees familiar with the development.
Apple has done this before. Ultimate hits like the iPod, iPhone, and Apple Watch started out as niche markets and grew into big companies. But even Apple executives are skeptical about the company’s prospects in virtual reality, and it may not be ready for a mainstream moment yet, they say.
Apple declined to comment.
The idea of an immersive, all-encompassing online world made more sense for many investors when people were stuck at home in the middle of the pandemic. Metaverse startups raised about $664 million in venture capital in the first five months of 2023, compared to $2.9 billion raised in the same period in 2022, according to data compiled by Pitchbook. A significant drop from over $30 million. The drop has seen investment in recent metaverse startups drop to about a quarter of its peak in the first half of 2022, Pitchbook said.
“The metaverse investing craze has gone, but now people are looking at AI,” says Cowen & Company analyst Doug Creutz. “People who were jumping on jumped off because it was a sexy story.”
Microsoft this year shut down a virtual reality world called AltspaceVR, which it acquired in 2017, according to a person familiar with the matter. The company also laid off some of its employees working on the HoloLens mixed-reality headset, and eliminated or redeployed teams working on the Metaverse project. Familiar with change.
In a statement, Microsoft said it remains committed to the Metaverse, pointing to news that it is rolling out three-dimensional avatars for Microsoft Teams meetings.
Disney has also laid off about 50 employees who worked on the Metaverse project, according to people familiar with the layoffs.news about Microsoft and Disney’s share previously reported wall street journal.
At Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan to restructure the company around Metaverse-centric technology was costly. Meta’s hardware division, Reality Labs, includes the Oculus headset, which is responsible for a significant portion of Meta’s recent surge in spending. The division lost about $4 billion in the first three months of the year.
Zuckerberg warned that building the Metaverse would be a losing plan with little prospect of early gains.It still took a long time is longer than he expected. Zuckerberg and his team have spent a lot of time talking about Meta’s AI expertise in recent months, but he resents the idea that the Metaverse is no longer his focus.
“There’s been a story unfolding that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse vision,” he said on a conference call with investors in April. “So I would like to be candid to say that it is not accurate.
Meta spokesperson Ashley Zandy said: “We have always been clear that our vision for the Metaverse is long-term and nothing has changed about that. “
On Thursday, Zuckerberg said, teased It’s a version of the company’s latest VR headset, the Meta Quest 3, priced at $499 and likely coming this year. The consumer has so far spent more than $1.5 billion of his money on apps and games from Meta’s Quest app store.
For Apple, the new headset could be the start of a long-term plan that will eventually lead to more popular virtual reality products like lightweight glasses.
Some analysts believe the company is taking an experimental approach to gauge how early adopters use it and may make changes before selling future versions to a wider audience. suggests there is. It will be similar to what it did with the Apple Watch. Initially marketed as a general-purpose iPhone companion, it was later reimagined as a fitness gadget.
Despite declining interest, many argue that it is too early to abandon the idea of the Metaverse. Companies like Roblox and Epic Games, who preached the metaverse long before it took off, are still working on their long-term vision.
Venture capitalist Matthew Ball, who has written a book about the Metaverse, said that after Facebook changed its name, mainstream attention to the concept would increase how much time people spend in immersive online worlds. said it spurred wild predictions about
“This was more due to poor scheduling,” Ball said. “The intense focus on the Metaverse in such a short period of time is sure to disappoint many, some claiming it is here now or will ever be.”
Roblox and Epic Games, creators of battle royale game Fortnite, could leverage tens of millions of participants, user-generated content, and the digital economy to deliver a more compelling vision of the Metaverse.
Roblox, a platform that offers millions of games often aimed at children, had 66.1 million daily users in Q1 2023, up 22% year-over-year. The company’s chief business officer, Craig Donat, said Roblox is working to expand into other immersive online experiences, but a full-fledged metaverse is still far away.
“It’s still at the one or two stage,” Donato said.
March, Epic Games releases new tools It aims to help Fortnite players create and monetize their own games on the company’s platform, helping build the online economy in Fortnite. This is the foundation of the Metaverse vision preached by the company’s CEO, Tim Sweeney. Sweeney said mainstream interest in the Metaverse has attracted people who are less invested in the space.
“Unfortunately, a lot of people have tried to stick with the trend without actually delivering the product,” he says. “But if you look at the trends, it looks like growth is continuing, exponential growth continues.”
Brian X. Chen and Karen Wise contributed to the report.
