Mark Zuckerberg Invites Preteens to Experience Virtual Reality with Facebook’s Quest Headset

Despite growing concerns about children’s excessive use of social media, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram intends to launch a digital portal that will allow children as young as 10 years old to access virtual reality via the Meta Quest headset.

Meta Platforms, which oversees the social media empire created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, said in a blog post on Friday that it is lowering the minimum age for a Quest account from 13 to 10. The Menlo Park, Calif., company framed the move later this year as a family-friendly way for more people to explore artificial worlds that Zuckerberg refers to as the “metaverse.”

The move to lure teenagers into a virtual world filled with digital avatars and other techies comes just weeks after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy urged tech companies and lawmakers to take action to protect children from the potentially harmful mental and emotional effects of overexposure. to social media.

Both Facebook and Instagram have come under fire for years for using tactics that get kids hooked on social media at a young age, undermining their real-life relationships with friends and family while exposing them to online bullying and sexual predators.

In a blog post, Meta said parents will retain control over their children’s accounts on the Quest 2 and Quest 3 headsets and promised that teenagers’ access will be limited to “age-appropriate” apps that use virtual reality, or VR. Preteens can’t have a Quest account without their parents’ express approval, and all apps on the platform also require parental consent, says the company, which recommends limiting the younger age group to two hours. daily time limit for headphones.

Other safeguards include setting all teenagers’ accounts to private by default and promising not to show them the ads that generate most of Meta’s revenue.

“We are building on this with our principles of responsible innovation and our commitment to creating safe, positive experiences for young people at the forefront,” Meta wrote in a blog post.

The company also provides comprehensive guidance for parents to assess whether they should allow their 10- to 12-year-olds to use VR headsets. One section of the guide cites “a growing body of research investigating the positive effects of VR in medical/clinical settings, including interventions that support the development of social competence skills, interfere with painful or distressing medical procedures, and support the development of specific skills in specialized populations” such as children, who have a stroke.

By expanding Quest’s potential audience, Zuckerberg appears to be taking another significant step toward his goal of shaping the metaverse into a sphere that will eventually become as popular as Facebook and Instagram have become since he founded the company in a college dorm. 20 years ago.

Until now, the metaverse has been mostly a digital ghost town, despite the Quest headsets being sold in the millions. The Meta division, which oversees Quest headphones and the Metaverse, lost $13.7 billion last year on revenue of $2.2 billion.

In addition, Meta faces huge new competition from Apple, which last week announced the Vision Pro headset, which is capable of pushing users into virtual settings as well. The high-end headphones, priced at $3,500, received enthusiastic responses in carefully staged demos, but won’t hit stores until early next year.

Meta has already announced that the next Quest headset will cost $500 to get more people to buy it before the Vision Pro launches, and now it’s taking steps to get teenagers on board.