The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that company executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, are quite optimistic about the launch of the Vision Pro headset. Concretely, the company hopes that Apple’s entry into the headset market will attract more consumers to its own headset activities.
“The company hopes the Vision Pro will galvanize the $50 billion Metaverse market, which has yet to achieve widespread consumer adoption,” WSJ sources mention. “Meta employees see MetaQuest and its software ecosystem as becoming a major alternative to Apple and Android’s role in smartphones. Meta executives and analysts predict a coming battle on the software maker side, which will play the most important role in attracting more users.
The launch of Vision Pro also impacts Meta’s strategy, which is now more focused on mixed reality than it initially was.
Apple has been critical of the metaverse
“Meta is increasingly focusing on mixed reality, which allows users to superimpose virtual images on real environments,” the WSJ sources said, adding that “previously, Meta was more about the Metaverse.”
Apple has been critical of the metaverse in the past. Late last year, Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of marketing, said “metaverse is a word I’ll never use again” when asked how he defined it. In October last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook questioned whether the concept was well-defined, saying: “I don’t think the average person would be able to explain what a metaverse is.” .
Meta has released VR headsets since its acquisition of Oculus in 2014, but has since struggled to expand its ecosystem, leading the market alone, without notable competitors. However, with the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro, Meta and Apple hope to boost the market, much like Android and the iPhone did on smartphones, according to the WSJ.
Source: “ZDNet Korea”