BURLINGAME, California. — Metathe parent company of Facebookopened its first physical store in Burlingame, California, to showcase products such as augmented reality glasses and viewers.
The store, which opened to the public starting Monday, is made for people who want to try products like Ray-Ban StoriesMeta’s augmented reality glasses and sunglasses, as well as the Portal video call gadget and Oculus virtual reality headsets.
Customers will have to order the glasses from Ray-Ban, but can purchase the other products in-store.
“It’s a very concrete step to distance ourselves from social networks and ads that mislead people, and elections, espionage, data and all that stuff; to a very physical representation of clean, sleek, well-designed, ‘cool’ hardware that makes you feel good,” said Omar Akhtar, director of research at Altimeter, a technology investment firm.
Akhtar said he “didn’t believe in virtual reality” until he sat down and tried an Oculus headset for the first time, and he thinks the same will happen to other people who can put on the headsets and try them out. Apple pioneered physical stores in Silicon Valley and Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, probably has hopes of replicating at least some of that success.
“The truth is that physical things have never and will never go away,” Akhtar said. “Everyone realizes that even if we’re going to go digital, we’re going to need to access it with hardware.”
good morning to meta
The last few have been good days for Meta.
Last April 27 the owner of Facebook announced that this social network registered 1.96 billion daily users during the first quarter of 2022, a figure higher than that estimated by analysts, so the shares of Meta they shot up 15 percent following the close of the stock market that day.
Specialists have estimated 1.94 billion users for Facebook in the first three months of the year.
With information from Bloomberg
