Facebook owner Meta on Thursday presented a preview of its first physical store, which features a floor-to-ceiling screen to display games on its virtual reality headsets and rooms with video calling devices.
The store, scheduled to open on May 9, is located on the campus of Meta’s Reality Labs unit in Silicon Valley. The unit develops hardware products that the company plans to sell, including Ray-Ban smart glasses, Portal video calling devices and the Oculus VR virtual reality suite.
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg says the metaverse could be the world’s next big computing platform, but warned it could take about a decade for the company’s bets to pay off.
Meanwhile, with growth slowing and the company still almost entirely reliant on digital ads for revenue, Meta has been cutting some long-term investments.
The company is experimenting with augmented reality technology that would allow users to participate in conferences as avatars via the Portal, without using headphones, said Micah Collins, director of product management who works on enterprise tools.
Collins acknowledged that the corporate metaverse business is nascent, and a spokesperson said most of the use of Horizon Workrooms, the virtual reality conferencing technology, comes from within Meta.
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