the metaverse war is declared

2023-06-09 17:06:00

Mark Zuckerberg grumbles. Since Monday, the tech world has been marveling at the technology concentrate of the Vision Pro, Apple’s $3,499 mixed reality headset. But the leader of Meta does not agree with this enthusiasm. In an email to its employees obtained by The Verge, he claims that the Vision Pro does not bring any real innovation, and that in any case, the vision of the market promoted by Apple is not the right one. However, experts agree to describe the Apple device as a product of a quality never seen on the market, which has the potential to finally take off.

Would Meta feel threatened? ” Apple’s entry into the augmented reality industry has a bittersweet taste for Meta. On the one hand, Apple’s presence in the market might drastically increase the attractiveness of virtual and augmented reality technologies. [VR et AR, ndlr], which should benefit all players in the sector. But on the other, a breakthrough from Apple might threaten Meta’s market share “, explains to the Tribune Kiran Raj, analyst at GlobalData.

Read alsoApple: why the announcement of its revolutionary Vision Pro headphones leaves Wall Street unmoved

Meta, a failed leader

At the end of 2021, Facebook became Meta to mark a strategic shift embodied by Mark Zuckerberg. The entrepreneur is convinced that virtual reality can become a breakthrough innovation as significant as the arrival of the Internet, and he has decided to bet billions of dollars on this bet. The company has therefore propelled the term metaverse – which designates virtual worlds – as a central element of its activity, and it has managed to bring many large groups in its wake.

But despite the billions of dollars spent and relative commercial success selling headphones, Meta has failed to gain mainstream adoption of its technology. Worse, the company experienced a descent into hell in 2022 due to the fall in revenues that its VR activity might not compensate for.

Result: the Reality Labs division of Meta continues to lose billions of dollars, for a turnover that does not take off. In the last quarter, it achieved only 339 million dollars in turnover (-51% compared to the previous year) and recorded nearly 4 billion dollars in net loss (+34%). And for good reason, Meta’s appealing products in virtual reality are fitness apps and video games like Rhythm Game. Beat Saber, insufficient to convince the general public. The failure is such that the company has temporarily pushed the term metaverse out of its discourse, in favor of the trendier one of ” artificial intelligence ».

Upscale versus affordability

While the situation is catastrophic for Meta, a tech juggernaut is attacking its leadership. For the moment, Apple seems to be focusing on augmented reality, which consists of projecting digital content into the real world, while Meta has historically focused on virtual reality, where the user is immersed in a completely virtual universe. But the helmets of the two manufacturers can adapt to both AR and VR, which is why the term ” mixed reality is used, and that the two fields are considered a single market.

Visually, the Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest 3 both look like ski goggles. Much less imposing than the first helmets of the 2010s, they are mostly free of wires, and operate independently, on battery. But at $3,499, Apple’s headset costs seven times as much as Meta’s, and three times as much as the Quest Pro (the more powerful version for businesses). At this price, it embeds screen, sensor and even superior processor technologies.

Initially, the two competitors should therefore advance in parallel, one on the very high end, the other on the rest of the market. But their trajectories are bound to cross to satisfy their respective ambitions. As noted with humor The InformationMeta can fear the same trajectory as Blackberry, which completely abandoned the manufacture of its emblematic keypad telephone, following the eruption of the iPhone, a very different touchscreen smartphone.

A first battle in software

The two giants should initially fight in the software, each wanting to impose its philosophy. ” It’s a competition of philosophy and ideas », explained as early as 2022 Mark Zuckerberg. « They believe that by doing everything themselves, and integrating the headset into their ecosystem, they will create a better user experience. We believe, on the contrary, that there are many things to be done thanks to the specialties of each company, which would allow the emergence of a much broader ecosystem.»

Since its transition in 2021, Meta has positioned itself as a central player in its ecosystem, and has forged links with companies such as Microsoft or Epic Games (the publisher of Fortnite), with the aim of developing common protocols and operating methods. Obviously, Apple did not participate in these attempts to federate the ecosystem.

Result: the mixed reality ecosystem seems to be heading straight for a situation similar to that of smartphones, with on one side an App Store controlled by Apple and sealed off from outside actors and on the other a Quest Store similar to Android , which allows the download of external applications. But for now, neither Meta nor Apple has a ” killer app “, that is to say a software that would make mixed reality unavoidable. The dynamic between the two might be played out on this point.