![]() ![]() So while previously I’ve used VR to enter fantastical settings, the one I’m sitting in today could hardly be more sterile. As humans, we do crave this social connection-and this is the best way to experience that in a digital form.” “But this is far better than a video call. “If I could be with you in a physical room right now, that’s going to be better than this,” Vishal Shah, the vice president, metaverse at Meta, says to me as I sit across from his avatar in a virtual meeting room. It’s interactions like this-of VR making the world feel a little bit smaller-that Meta hopes to facilitate en masse in the coming decade. You can do a lot more without money in here than in the real world.” When I tell him that I’ve never felt like I’ve been able to afford to play real golf, he responds: “Hey, I’m poor as hell too, brother. Our pseudo-blind date starts awkwardly, but we both loosen up after a few rounds. Kenny has clearly spent a lot of time playing, excitedly describing all of the possible trick shots at each juncture. When I enter the game, I’m paired up with an avatar who goes by “kennypowers,” speaks in a Southern accent and cheerfully walks me through the mechanics of the game. According to the game’s creators, it hosts hundreds of thousands of weekly players weekly in over 40 countries. One of the most popular is Walkabout Mini Golf, a disarmingly simple but effective iteration of Putt-Putt. Meta’s Oculus headsets-the Quest 2 is priced at $400-have been selling steadily, and they boast plenty of games that do quite well. “Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,” Zuckerberg said in a statement at the time. ![]() As word about the technology spread around Silicon Valley about its 2014 prototype, Mark Zuckerberg sensed an opportunity and bought the company for a cool $2 billion. Games were the entire purpose of the VR company Oculus, after all, when it was co-founded in 2012 by the 19-year-old Palmer Luckey. ![]() Meta itself is well aware of the importance of games to this nascent ecosystem. Many of the most popular apps in the Quest store lean into color, fantasy and childlike whimsy: Beat Saber, Smash Drums, Ancient Dungeon. It’s a fitting opening foray into the metaverse: just as saloons of the Wild West proudly boasted debauchery-filled, freewheeling gambling games, so too does this new virtual frontier. But there’s a full sword fight unfolding on my right, and barely anyone seems to be paying attention to the game itself. I carefully count out chips from a pile under my left hand and throw them in the middle for a raise. There are top hats, giant sunglasses, liquor poured into delicate China teacups, insults and ammo blasted every which way. And the next year will likely bring about both increased competition-as Apple reportedly preps its own VR headset-and regulation, with the Federal Trade Commission continuing to push against Meta’s aggressive acquisition strategy. ![]() When Mark Zuckerberg posts something new about Meta’s metaverse, public sentiment is overwhelmingly negative. Many of Meta’s virtual spaces are all but ghost towns, with reports alleging that even Meta’s own employees are reluctant to spend time inside them. Since the beginning of the year, Meta’s stock has declined 70%, compared with the S&P 500’s 20% drop over the same period. Those losses, in part due to lower sales of the Quest 2 virtual-reality headset, added to Meta’s overall disappointing financial performance and sparked a stock selloff that saw its shares tumble. On Wednesday, the company reported a quarterly loss of $3.67 billion in its Reality Labs, the unit responsible for delivering on Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse plans. So the company has changed its name, invested $10 billion this year alone in VR and AR, and forged uneasy alliances with tech competitors and global governmental agencies, all in an effort to become the company that ushers in a new virtual era. Perhaps not coincidentally, Facebook is losing ground fast to TikTok, and Meta’s longtime central business model-ad revenue on Facebook’s News Feed-is faltering. They’re also hoping this uncharted journey into the metaverse can revive the company, which shed the Facebook name and rebranded itself a year ago as Meta. ![]()
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