Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered remarks during his company’s quarterly earnings call reaffirming his commitment to “the metaverse vision”.
He posted the comments to Facebook and we’ve excerpted the relevant segment below:
A narrative has developed that we’re somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse vision, so I just want to say upfront that’s not accurate. We’ve been focusing on both AI and the metaverse for years now, and we will continue to focus on both.
The two areas are also related. A breakthrough in computer vision was what enabled us to ship the first standalone VR device. Mixed reality is built on a stack of AI technologies for understanding the physical world and blending it with digital objects. Being able to procedurally generate worlds will be important for delivering compelling experiences at scale. And our vision for AR glasses involves an AI-centric operating system that we think will be the basis for the next generation of computing. Metaverse technologies will also help to deliver AI as well. For example, embodying AI agents will take advantage of the deep investment we’ve made in avatars over the last several years.
Building the metaverse is a long term project, but the rationale for it remains the same and we remain committed to it.
In the near term, we’ve reached a few milestones that I think are worth calling out. More than a billion Meta avatars have now been created. Since last year, the number of titles in the Quest store with at least $25 million in revenue has doubled. More than half of Quest daily actives now spend more than an hour using their device.
The next milestone is that we’re gearing up to launch our next generation consumer virtual and mixed reality device later this year. We launched Quest 2 almost three years ago at this point. It was a very big step forward for VR, and I’m really excited to show the world all the improvements and new technology we’ve developed since then at a price point that will be accessible for lots of people.
