By Laine Penney
Virtual reality was a staple of the COVID-19 lockdown. With our collective society being quarantined inside our homes, people needed alternative ways of getting “fresh air,” and who else to profit off of this but Mark Zuckerberg?
Meta Platforms Inc., formerly Facebook Inc., released their first VR headset back in 2016, the Oculus Rift. Three years later, they dropped their first standalone headset: the Oculus Quest. It wasn’t until 2020 that big opportunities for the Quest started to boom.
By 2020, Oculus sales skyrocketed due to the demand for at-home entertainment, with sales increasing by 353% within the span of two months. A survey conducted a year after the quarantine began stated that 70% of VR users had purchased their headset within the past year. Furthermore, 90% of owners used their headset once a week.
The explosion of popularity encouraged Meta to strive for new innovations and engagements in the VR realm. Inspired by the pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg went full steam ahead on his long standing project of the Metaverse. He dropped newer headsets, and the development of Horizon Worlds, an online multiplayer social platform, marked his push into his virtual visions. Launching in late 2021, Horizon Worlds allowed users to play games and interact with other users, similar to the popular game VRChat. The difference was that one was more successful than the other.
VR users did not respond well to the release of Horizon Worlds. Reality Labs, the company’s division responsible for developing the Metaverse, reported losses in the billions each quarter that passed. Finally, after 5 years and a mobile release in 2023, Meta announced that they would be shutting down Horizon Worlds this year on March 17th.
Their strides in VR innovation became for naught at the cost of billions. Their “next frontier” rebrand from Facebook to Meta seemed to be for nothing. In fact, they ended up cutting over 1,000 employees from Reality Labs back in January.
“Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” Zuckerberg wrote when announcing Facebook’s rebrand. Now, with their eyes set on artificial intelligence, it seems Meta’s visions were only a virtual dream.
beniciapaw.com 