Comment by willy_k
5 hours ago
It’s premature to say that the idea failed; The flashy controversial “metaverse” angle where you can live your whole life on the Quest or whatever isn’t happening, but their investment into AR/VR has definitely started to show real payoff potential with their glasses.
They address the friction of use issue being discussed, they’re even more discrete and available than a phone. And they are getting a lot of general public recognition, albeit not for the best reasons (people discretely filming, for genuine social media reactions but also for other reasons..).
Their tech is improving at a decent pace and they’ve recently put out a product that is both ready for consumer (at least with select use cases) adoption, and actually reasonably available to the public.
I don’t mean that VR failed entirely, just that the metaverse as a concept is basically dead. VR will live on in the niches where it makes sense.
If you’re talking about the Meta Ray Ban glasses, I wouldn’t really call that a successor. There’s no AR or VR to them that I can tell; just glasses with speakers, a mic and a camera. It’s a neat product, but not a platform in the way VR was meant to be. They also have real competition. I do actually own a pair of the Bose headphone sunglasses, which are practically the same product without a camera (which I’m sure they could add if they wanted). Unless people suddenly care about the Meta AI integration, and again; Bose or someone else could add a phone companion app.
I was taking your comment to mean that the metaverse movement (as in the rebranding to Meta etc., rather than the specific concept itself) is dead, which apparently you did not mean so that’s on me.
They have two current Meta Ray Ban options, the “Gen 2” and the “Display”, the latter of which does have an AR component.