Technology
Meta instead of Facebook: The Metaverse is still a long way off
Almost a year ago, on October 28th, 2021, the Facebook group was renamed Meta. photo
© Andre M. Chang/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of virtual reality got a reality check. The Metaverse takes time, but it’s already costing a lot of money. But Zuckerberg doesn’t want to give up.
When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the focus on virtual worlds a year ago and gave the group the new name Meta, he was not stingy with big words. “We are convinced that the Metaverse will be the successor to the mobile Internet,” he announced.
The technology will create a feeling of presence – “as if we were right there with the people, no matter how far away we actually are.”
A year later, that vision doesn’t seem any closer. The group is now called Meta instead of Facebook. But its mainstay is still the advertising revenue that Facebook and Instagram bring in with their billions of users. Zuckerberg now emphasizes that change will take time. “It’s not like these things will be ready in a year or even two or three years,” he said in a recent interview with tech blog The Verge. However, the group is determined to push the development forward – “we will do that for the next decade – or as long as it has to be”.
Metaverse development costs billions
The invention of the future devours billions. In the first half of this year alone, Reality Labs – the division that bundles everything to do with the Metaverse and glasses for displaying virtual reality – accumulated an operating loss of around $5.77 billion.
That’s definitely money that the Facebook group can shoulder. However, the problem with Zuckerberg and Meta is that their core business is making less money. The meta apps threw in the first half of the year an operating profit of 22.65 billion dollars – a year earlier it was 28 billion dollars.
On the one hand, advertisers are reducing their marketing expenses due to inflationary pressures and concerns about the economy. On the other hand, Apple’s measures to protect privacy cost meta billions. App providers like Facebook are now required to ask iPhone users for permission if they want to track their behavior across different services and applications. Many rejected this – and thus smashed business models in online advertising that were based on this permanent tracking.
Metaverse technology could replace computers
However, Zuckerberg assured that investments in the future would not be cut. Instead, savings are made in other areas. And Meta hopes to get companies excited about the idea of virtual worlds that could house their operations and businesses. The roughly 200 million PCs that are bought annually, mostly for business purposes, could be replaced with Metaverse technology like glasses, he said. Eventually anyway. Because even with the recently presented VR glasses Quest Pro for 1400 dollars, he restricted that only later generations will have reached the necessary level of maturity.
Zuckerberg summed it up that he was glad to have initiated the realignment in the rather ideal world a year ago instead of under today’s pressure. How long he can continue chasing the Metaverse dream will depend largely on the profitability of Facebook’s business.
Zuckerberg’s desire to be at the forefront of the next computing platform is understandable. Because on the mobile Internet with today’s smartphones, despite billions of users, Meta is only a guest on the platforms of Apple and Google, which plays the key role in the Android system.
Other companies are also developing virtual realities
However, Meta is far from the only company looking to gain a foothold in the Metaverse. The Nvidia group, which specializes in graphics cards and artificial intelligence, operates its “Omniverse” platform, in which companies can, for example, set up entire virtual plants in order to optimize processes. “From our point of view, the Metaverse is the direct continuation of the Internet,” says the responsible Nvidia manager Rev Lebaredian. Only that you move from a two-dimensional world into a 3D environment. And for that you will need a lot of standards, with which all players would have to pull together in the end.
And the Apple group, with which Meta is currently in a clinch, has been lining up its Metaverse building blocks for years, although the concept may not be called that there. Apple is initially expected to produce glasses that – similar to the Quest Pro – can record their surroundings with cameras and show the user additional details. According to media reports and analysts, it could be in 2023. Then the fight for the Metaverse should come to a head again.