Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech wearing a virtual reality headset at the Oculus Developer Conference in San Jose, California.
Glenn Chapman | AFP | Getty Images
Yuan As competition between Facebook’s parent company and Facebook intensifies, there’s no sign it will significantly reduce its losses on its investment in Metaverse. apple in the virtual reality market.
Meta revealed in its first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday that its Reality Labs unit recorded an operating loss of $3.85 billion. Revenue from the Metaverse division was $440 million, up about 30% from $339 million a year ago and accounting for only about 1% of Meta’s total sales in the quarter.
Analysts expected an operating loss of $4.31 billion for the quarter on sales of $512.5 million, according to StreetAccount.
Reality Labs has now lost more than $45 billion since Meta first began reporting business units separately in late 2020.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the Metaverse “the next frontier,” imagining a digital world that promotes productivity and entertainment. In 2021, he changed the company’s name from Facebook to Meta to reflect his vision for the future of computing.
Currently, developing virtual universe technology is still a nascent and expensive endeavor.
The company launched the Quest 3 VR headset, the latest version of its mixed reality hardware, in September, starting at $499. Apple began selling the $3,499 Vision Pro in February, touting a so-called “spatial computing” experience.
Meta announced on Monday that it will work with third-party hardware companies to create new VR headsets using the same Meta Horizon operating system that powers its Quest headset. Zuckerberg said that while Apple “basically wins” in the mobile phone market with its closed ecosystem, Meta’s move is aimed at ensuring “an open model defines the next generation of computing.”
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