Connect Conference to Highlight Investment Opportunities in Augmented and Virtual Reality
At the company’s first in-person conference since the beginning of the pandemic, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to provide investors with an update on his vision to create the immersive metaverse, which he believes is the future of computing.
The announcements at Meta Connect, Meta’s biggest event of the year, show how Zuckerberg plans to shift this year from investor passion to artificial intelligence and augmented and virtual reality technologies.
The stakes are high for the event, as investors last year slammed the parent company of Facebook and Instagram for spending heavily on the metaverse, prompting Zuckerberg to lay off tens of thousands of workers to continue funding his vision.
Developers are monitoring the situation to assess what apps they could create for Meta’s latest hardware devices, such as the new Quest virtual reality headset that will be released this fall. Meanwhile, investors are looking for signs of whether the gamble, which has lost the company more than $40 billion since 2021, can pay off.
The top priority of the day is AI-powered virtual assistants with distinct personalities that the company plans to embed in its apps, according to two sources. The Wall Street Journal originally reported on the plan to launch generative AI chatbots on Connect.
Just before the event, Meta said that it will implement the plan announced at the beginning of last year to introduce mobile and online versions of the social VR platform Horizon Worlds. It also quietly added legs to its previously upper-body-only virtual reality avatars, as spotted by industry blog Upload VR.
