The Metaverse isn’t a Technicolor Problem: Virtual Reality and the Metaverse Has Solded over 20 Million Headsets
“Being a cynic about new and innovative technology is easy,” Mr. Stone said. It’s not easy, but we believe the metaverse is the future of computing, so we are building it.
As bad as Meta is, the company is also really good at virtual reality. Judging by its current lineup of products, that is not the part of the metaverse that Meta is good at. People are more likely to want to play games on a console. Mark Rabkin told staff that Meta has sold over 20 million headsets so far. That includes both the Quest and Quest 2. IDC has previously estimated Meta has sold around 15 million Quest 2 headsets, which likely means the Quest 2 makes up the bulk of headsets sold. That seems like a small number, but the Nintendo GameCube only sold 21 million consoles in its entire lifespan, and the Xbox Series X and S are estimated to have sold approximately 20 million consoles thus far.
Meta said in February that it had grown its game to 300,000 active users, but that was barely higher than Facebook’s more than 3 billion monthly active users. There are no up-to-date figures provided by the company.
Mark Zuckerberg and the Verge: A’metaverse’ skeptic for the metaverse, and when he wants to go mainstream
Mark Zuckerberg will show off his new high-end virtual reality headset during the Meta annual Connect conference later today. The device is expected to add mixed reality technology, that blends the virtual and physical, so it will focus on more than just VR. Face and eye tracking will allow higher-fidelity graphics. Expect a price point that is significantly higher than the Quest 2’s $399 price tag.
The promise of virtual reality has been talked about for a long time by Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. He has more to prove this year. Investors are doubting his expensive pivot to the metaverse. His main business of social media is under pressure like never before, and he recently put in place a hiring freeze for the rest of the year. The sales have exceeded 15 million according to estimates. Meta has a unprofitable business for virtual reality for the foreseeable future.
Meta Connect is being held virtually this year and will be streamed online for anyone to watch. If you have a Quest 2, you can use virtual reality to view it. The Verge will be covering the event as it happens, which kicks off at 10AM PT / 1PM ET.
I consider myself a “metaverse” skeptic. The term entered common parlance without really referring to any specific technology, and companies like Meta, née Facebook, that promote it most heavily don’t seem to be very good at building … whatever it is. I’m open minded. My editor challenged me to spend time in the metaverse during the holidays and I was down to give it a go.
The idea was simple. Companies like Meta say that their platforms will bring people together. The holidays would be the perfect time to test this. It’s a time for family and friends to gather, often involving people from other states or even countries. If ever there was a chance for new tech to connect people, it would be in March 2020. But the holidays are a close second.
The platform we decided to use was Meta’s Horizon Worlds. This choice is actually the result of this experiment starting from the beginning. If the goal was simply putting different people together in the same virtual room, that exists! We’ve spent a lot of time in Zoom calls and Animal Crossing.
Is Virtual Reality appealing to me? When would I want to try it out? A friend of mine who wasn’t interested in virtual reality?
I asked everyone I could think of to help me with this experiment. I asked friends, partners, and family. I asked people who lived down the road, and people who lived thousands of miles away. I did talk to someone who was willing to try the experiment with me. It’s that no one could.
There was a short supply of willingness as well. One friend in particular—someone I love dearly and won’t get to see for the holidays, in other words a perfect candidate for this experiment—said she’d be willing to help. Grudgingly. The idea wasn’t appealing on its own, though. I feel like Virtual Reality would be a stark reminder that you’re not here. Still, she agreed to try it out in principle—but she couldn’t because, like everyone else I knew, she didn’t own a headset.
Maybe I was just unlucky, but I’m probably not alone. Hard data is a little hard to pin down—in part because many polls lump together owning a VR headset with merely using one—but one survey from eMarketer released in 2021 estimated that by this year, only 31.3 million people in the US would “experience VR content” once a month in VR. Note, that’s not “own a VR headset.”
Mixed Reality Experience in the Quest 2 & 3 Platforms, and Where Is It Coming From? CEO Dr. Y.R. Himel
Himel said that while Meta canned its plan for a wristwatch with a camera and a display, it was still working on another one to accompany its glasses.
According to Rabkin, the main challenge for Meta is to convince people to pay more for the game than for the existing game. He told employees that they have to get enthusiasts fired up about it. “We have to prove to people that all this power, all these new features are worth it.”
Mixed reality will be a huge selling point, and Rabkin said there will be a new “smart guardian” to help wearers navigate the real world while they are wearing the device. He said the mixed reality needs to make it feel better, more natural, and that the main north star for the team was from the moment you wore it. “You can walk effortlessly through your house knowing you can see perfectly well. It is possible to put items on your desktop. You are free to take your coffee. You can stay in there much longer.”
Rabkin said there will be a number of new apps and games for the Quest 3, including mixed reality experiences. He said that a more accessible headset will be launched in a few years. “The goal for this headset is very simple: pack the biggest punch we can at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market.”
Meta might realize it is about to make the same mistake as other tech companies who have gone into game consoles by working on its third Quest headset right now.
Rabkin said that they want to make it better for work use and nail work like text and things. We want to make the split architecture feel even better and take a lot of the comfort features of Quest Pro and put them on your head.
Meanwhile, he acknowledged that the current Quest is struggling to keep new users engaged. “Right now, we’re on our third year of Quest 2,” he told employees. the people who bought it last Christmas, they are not as engaged in it now as the ones who bought it early.
Rabkin wanted employees to make the sharing of virtual reality content on other platforms more trivial, redesign the Quest store to make it more dynamic, and give developers the ability to do automated promotions.
Towards a Better Future: Maximizing Revenue of Smartphones and Smart Glasses with Artificial Intelligence, Texting, and Typing
He said that we need to be better at growth and retention. It’s necessary to make social more reliable and intuitive so people can rely on it.
In 2025, Himel said the third generation of the smart glasses will ship with a display that he called a “viewfinder” for viewing incoming text messages, scanning QR codes, and translating text from another language in real time. The glasses will come with a “neural interface” band that allows the wearer to control the glasses through hand movements, such as swiping fingers on an imaginary D-pad. Eventually, he said the band will let the wearer use a virtual keyboard and type at the same words per minute as what mobile phones allow.
Himel framed the market opportunity around the almost two billion pairs of regular glasses and hundreds of millions of smartwatches that are sold each year. “If we can put on shelves a great product at a great price with the right value, we believe we can get into these upgrade cycles and have a lot of growth of our devices,” he told the room. “It’s on us to deliver.”
Meta is planning to rely on its existing business model of advertising to help it make money off these future devices. Himel said the company thinks it can make a higher average revenue per user than what it makes currently in social media, thanks to a combination of selling virtual goods, optional add-ons like cloud backups, and AR ads.
He said that they should be able to run a good business. “I think it’s easy to imagine how ads would show up in space when you have AR glasses on. Our ability to track conversions should be close to 100 percent because of the amount of focus that has been given to that area.
“If we’re hitting anything near projections, it will be a tremendous business,” he said. This is a business that we haven’t seen before on mobile phones.
Price of the Quest 3 vs Quest 2 Mixed Reality headset: How will Meta try to push the limit of the standard VR headset?
Meta says its goal is to “create hardware that’s affordable for as many people as possible” and that it’s lowering the Pro’s price to make its tech “available to even more businesses and professionals around the world.”
According to the company’s hardware roadmap, which was published by The Verge earlier this week, it doesn’t seem like the high-end VR headset is getting a follow-up for at least a few years. The company trying to get rid of its existing inventory would benefit from a price drop of this magnitude.
The price of the Quest Pro will be lowered on March 5th for the US and Canada, and on the 15th in the rest of the world. The Quest 2 is getting cheaper on the 5th in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK, and the US.
It is a bit more confusing than the first one, which was a success since it was released in 2020. For one, the 128GB version is sticking around but at the same $399.99 price point it’s had since Meta raised its price by $100 in August of last year. (Meta doesn’t really explain why it’s not lowering the price for that version.) If it only costs $60 to double the storage, it is hard to imagine many people going for the lower-tier option. The adjustment to the now $429 256GB model almost knocks it back down to what it was before the hike, which happened a year ago.
Meta’s hoping to explain that price hike by showing off all the cool features of the Quest 3 versus the Quest 2. “We have to prove to people that all this power, all these new features are worth it,” Rabkin told staff. Alex reported that he received a presentation that stated the plan was to show that with mixed reality. The main north star of the team was from the moment you put on this headset, it had to make it feel better.
If the goal is to build the audience of mixed reality than a more expensive console focused on less proven experiences, then gaming is… unlikely to do it, especially when you consider that its current big, expensive mixed reality headset is doing so poorly it’s dropping its price only five months after launch. Rabkin said that there will be a fourth headset in the next 10 years that will pack the most punch at the most attractive price point in the consumer market. We will soon be stuck with a expensive game console that wants to take us on a journey that most people are not interested in yet.
What Microsoft did when Microsoft launched the XBOX One and the PS4 Launched the Xbox One as a Home Theater Computer to Play Games
Even if there are only ten thousand active users, destroying that user value should be avoided if possible. Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally valuable to them or others.
Carmack is the former consulting CTO at Meta. He helped build and create the video game industry, as well as creating massive, enduring hits like Wolfenstein 3D. Unlike Meta, Carmack seems to get that telling people you’re going to take away their games to free up bandwidth to work on a metaverse no one especially wants yet is a bad idea.
That plan to focus on something new and different instead of the games that made the console thrive is very similar to what Microsoft did when it launched the Xbox One. That device came with an IR blaster! You could use the box as a cable box if you had a coax line. Microsoft said they created the XBOX One as a home theater computer that also played games. The gaming players bought the PS4 instead.