Meta, the company that owns and operates the social media site Facebook, is reportedly planning to open a series of retail stores to showcase its augmented and virtual reality devices. The company changed its name from Facebook to Meta at a time when Facebook was facing a wealth of negative publicity following recent whistleblower revelations. The documents, since dubbed the Facebook Papers, detailed how the company ignored the safety and well-being of its users and systematically disregarded warning signs about fake news and misinformation on the platform in the pursuit of growth.
The name change also includes the company's AR and VR operations, with the Oculus branding being dropped in favor of the new Meta name. That's according to Andrew Bosworth, the company's vice president of AR and VR, who recently confirmed that the Oculus Quest and Oculus App will be known as the Meta Quest and Meta Quest App. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since announced that users will no longer need to log in to a Facebook account to use an Oculus/Meta VR headset.
Meta's reported plan to open retail stores comes from The New York Times, which claims that the company will use the stores to showcase its virtual reality headsets, augmented reality glasses and other devices that will form the basis of its so-called 'Metaverse.' The publication claims to have seen internal documents that lay out the company's vision for its AR/VR products and how it plans to market them to consumers around the world through these stores. According to the documents, the stores will help make the world more connected and elicit feelings of "curiosity, closeness" among visitors.
The report further claims that the company has been planning the retail stores for months, and they have nothing to do with the recent rebranding. While Meta has refused to comment on the report, NYT claims that work on the project has already started, although there's no confirmation on when or where the first store will open for business. In fact, the project is still understood to be in a nascent stage and could even be shelved entirely.
While the metaverse sounds like an interesting proposition, many experts and industry insiders have expressed concerns. Notably, one of those to have recently poured cold water on the metaverse hype is Microsoft President Brad Smith, who said that the technology may not be all that it is being hyped up to be. It is interesting to hear Smith advising caution over what to expect from the metaverse, given that Microsoft has announced its own metaverse plans recently, which suggests that the company is embarking on a similar path to Meta.
Source: NYT
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