Mark Zuckerberg's $1499 Headsets Won’t Help Meta
As Mark Zuckerberg spoke to the camera in a pre-recorded presentation on Tuesday to kick off Meta Platforms Inc.'s annual virtual reality conference, he needed to address the elephant in the room: Enormous skepticism had grown around his vision for the metaverse.
New users were finding his main Horizon platform buggy, and employees were getting antsy about the radical shift to virtual reality that Zuckerberg announced at this event one year ago. They needed a good reason to believe in his vision, but the Facebook co-founder didn't give them one.
Instead, he doubled down on wowing people with cutting-edge tech, unveiling an expensive, high-end headset that hardly anyone will buy. He focused on how the device would be used by employers for holding work meetings, even though there is virtually no market for that yet.
“Prioritizing hardware that supports facial expressions and eye contact … designing new avatars and new photorealistic avatars. These are things you prioritize if you're focused on helping people connect,” Zuckerberg said at the conclusion of his keynote, which was light on details such as product timelines or specific contributions from a few big-name partners like Microsoft Corp.
While Zuckerberg spent most of the hour-and-a-half long presentation as his regular self on camera, the Facebook co-founder had one brief moment walking around a virtual stage as an avatar that for once, had legs. With face shading and smoother gestures, it was an improvement on the cartoonish version Zuckerberg was mocked for posting in August.
But it also underscored how Zuckerberg's obsessive and superficial formula for human connection is founded on things like realistic renderings of faces that can raise eyebrows, and duplicating
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