Andre Elijah, a developer specializing in experiences for virtual reality headsets, is filing a lawsuit against Meta. He accuses Mark Zuckerberg’s company of having improperly canceled the launch of its yoga application for the Meta Quest 2 and Quest Pro. He is seeking damages in the amount of $352 million.
The company AEI has designed a virtual reality yoga app for VR headsets in collaboration with Meta. The fruit of their work was to be presented to the public during the Meta Connect 2023 event, during which Mark Zuckerberg announced new developments in AI, but also his new products for mixed reality, the Meta Quest 3 AR headsetnotably.
According to the plaintiff’s lawyers, “this launch would have propelled AEI fitness app tops VR fitness apps and would have brought it a significant market share”, all by finally popularizing Meta Quest helmets to the general public. This was before Meta learned that the developer was also in negotiations to port the application to ByteDance’s Pico and the Apple Vision Pro.
Meta cancels release of VR yoga app so it won’t appear on Apple’s Vision Pro
At this news, Meta canceled the launch of AEI’s Fitness app. According to Mr. Elijah, this is an abusive breach of contract, and the company only acted in this way because of monopoly it holds in the market for VR hardware, software and app stores. As compensation for the damage suffered, in addition to the sums still to be collected which Meta refuses to pay, AEI thus claims the sum of 353.2 million dollars.
Read — Meta develops AR/VR headsets and glasses, Mark Zuckerberg still believes in his Metaverse
It is not certain that the plaintiff will succeed in this case. Indeed, the contract linking it to Meta stipulates that the giant of Silicon Valley has the right to terminate the agreement for any reason, and at any time, and that he is the sole owner of all “deliverables”. That said, porting to other platforms is authorized, under certain conditions.