Meta, a Facebook-owned company, provides a first peek at its first shop and corporate features.
CALIFORNIA,- Meta Platforms Inc, which owns Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), revealed an early look at its first physical shop on Wednesday, which includes a floor-to-ceiling screen for demonstrating games on its virtual reality headgear and spaces for testing video calling gadgets.
The store, which is planned to debut on May 9, is located inside Meta’s Reality Labs’ main site in the Silicon Valley town of Burlingame, California. The division is working on the hardware goods that the corporation hopes to sell there, such as Ray-Ban smart glasses, Portal video-calling devices, and Oculus VR headsets.
The shop design, with its blonde wood and simple furnishings, mimics the look pioneered by Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) when it established retail locations more than two decades ago.
The Meta shop brings to life what has mostly been a potential future business for the world’s largest social media firm, which has spent extensively in virtual and augmented reality in an effort to establish the “metaverse,” a phrase used to describe immersive, shared virtual worlds.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg believes the metaverse might be the world’s next great computer platform, but he warns that the company’s bets may take a decade to pay off.
Meanwhile, with growth slowing and the firm still relying almost completely on digital advertisements for income, Meta is reducing long-term expenditures.
Meta is aggressively pushing its hardware gadgets to companies in addition to individuals. It demonstrated conference calls at the shop that may include a combination of virtual reality avatars and regular video calling.
According to Micah Collins, a director of product management focusing on business products, the company is experimenting with augmented reality technology that would allow users to attend conferences as avatars via Portal without donning headsets.
Collins recognised that the corporate metaverse business is in its early stages, and a spokeswoman stated that the majority of Horizon Workrooms, the VR conferencing platform, is used within Meta.
Nonetheless, Collins stated that the corporation sees possibilities.
Despite the fact that many goods are still in their early stages and are unknown in their consumer context, “there’s enough there to give us a lot of confidence to attack the area,” he added.
