“Who today is really ready to replace their smartphone with a pair of augmented reality glasses? » @BELGAIMAGE
By changing the name of his group including Facebook, Whatsapp and Messenger a year ago, Mark Zuckerberg intended to set a firm course for the metaverse. To hear it, it is in this virtual world, a cyberspace where one accesses via an augmented reality helmet, that would reside neither more nor less the future of humanity.
The hallucinated whim of a business leader under the growing threat of competition? Or a premonitory vision of what social and professional interactions will be like during the second third of the 21st century? So far, it seems rather that this is the first option. Arrived this summer in France and Spain, Horizon Worlds (the name of the Meta universe where we will be supposed to play, work and interact), did little to convince. In Belgium, it is still not available.
snake biting its tail
According to an internal document seen by le Wall Street Journal, the results of the metaverse would be more than mixed. Only 200,000 users are active there every month, while Meta was hoping for 500,000 by the end of 2022. At the start of the year, Horizon Worlds had 300,000 users; the virtual world would therefore struggle to keep its users (on average, they would abandon the metaverse following only one month of use). Meta employees themselves would rarely connect to it. A snake biting its tail: according to an internal survey at Meta, the main reason for abandonment (apart from the low realism of the available avatars) would be… the lack of active users.
For the sauce to take, Meta has promised the imminent arrival of a web version on computer, smartphone and tablet that does not require an augmented reality headset (but then, with what added value compared to existing social networks?), as well as improving the Horizon Worlds experience. Meta would also consider offering users the possibility of being paid by brands, such as influencers on TikTok&co.
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The reasons for this failure (temporary, in any case) are certainly multiple. Among them, the economic and ecological issues of such a model. “We now realize that the metaverse is extremely greedy, because these virtual universes require increased computing powerpointed in Le Soir Nicolas van Zeebroeck, professor of digital economics at Solvay. There is a real risk of backlash from digital footprint“. “Who today is really ready to replace their smartphone with a pair of augmented reality glasses? The market is not ready“, also slipped the professor.
In the meantime, Meta’s massive investments in the virtual world are leading to results which, in the real world, are struggling to reassure the markets. After falling revenues for the first time in the group’s history, Meta’s market valuation fell from more than 1,000 billion dollars at the end of August to 345 billion in October, a drop of more than 65%.