Facebook’s Metaverse Project Experiences Major Financial Loss
During a virtual interview, Mark Zuckerberg impressed viewers with the latest advancements in hyper-realistic 3D avatars within the Metaverse. Nevertheless, Meta’s remarkable loss of $3.74 billion in its Reality Labs division during Q3 of this year remains significant. As the company deals with these financial challenges, Zuckerberg’s approach has been to reduce the workforce in the research units responsible for virtual and augmented reality hardware and software.
Meta has been at the forefront of developing tools for virtual reality, including the Meta Quest headset and Spark AR Studio, a Facebook-backed toolkit for augmented reality projects. They have also delved into the areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Investors’ confidence has continued to waver
Since things are not going as planned, Meta has resorted to layoffs. The exact number of layoffs is not disclosed, but according to the Notebookcheck report, the company may have laid off around 21,000 employees after November 2022. The workforce reduction is a strategic move to instill investor confidence in Reality Labs’ cost effectiveness, even as the division’s revenue declines. Nevertheless, losses have accumulated to a staggering $21.3 billion as of August 2022.
Additionally, Meta’s VR experiences and headsets, which were expected to generate huge revenue, have been criticized by some users for being incomplete and heavy.
Specifically, Meta’s push to make a splash in the virtual reality arena included giving away high-end Quest Pro headsets valued at $1,500 to all attendees at last year’s Roblox RDC23 conference. Now the Quest 3, priced at $500, is ready to hit the market with high expectations for a better user experience. However, avid VR fans on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit have expressed their displeasure with the headset, especially its audio features, which Meta is expected to lack.
Recent technological advances have attracted attention, notably the “first interview in the Metaverse” coined by podcaster Lex Fridman. These lifelike avatars are the product of advanced software that includes 3D modeling, full face scans and full body scans, hinting at possibilities yet to be unlocked in the virtual world.
