When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of the company to ‘Meta’ in 2021, he dreamed of a virtual world (Metaverse – Virtual Reality) where people would live, work and play as avatars. Today that vision is on the verge of ending. Meta recently laid off 10 percent of its employees working on the ‘Metaverse’. The company has announced that from June 15, people will not be able to use immersive platforms like Horizon Worlds through a VR headset (an electronic device worn over the eyes). The project on which the company lost about 80 billion dollars (about Rs 7.5 lakh crore), is now winding down. This ambitious plan of Zuckerberg is considered to be one of the most expensive failures in the tech world, because now the company’s entire focus is on AI. Zuckerberg started this journey in 2014 by purchasing the company ‘Oculus’ for about Rs 16,600 crore. He was confident that virtual reality would replace smartphones. For this he bought gaming studios and spent crores on developers. This idea seemed revolutionary at the time of Covid lockdown, but later the reality was different. Early versions of the Metaverse were full of technical glitches, which were widely ridiculed on social media. Even after spending about Rs 7.4 lakh crore, the general public completely rejected it. Apple’s expensive headsets and market indifference have spoiled the game of Meta. Not only Meta, the giant company ‘Apple’ which has entered this race has also got a big blow. The price of Apple Vision Pro, launched in 2024, was around Rs 3 lakh, which was far away from the budget of a common man. Analysts believe that establishing VR technology as an independent platform is more difficult and time-consuming than expected. Companies like Disney have also eliminated the positions of their ‘Chief Metaverse Officers’. Now Meta has moved its flagship app Horizon Worlds away from VR and towards mobile phones, which is a formal admission of the project’s defeat. Meta has accepted his defeat. In a conference last year, Zuckerberg mentioned the word ‘metaverse’ only twice, while taking the name of ‘AI’ 23 times. The company is now planning to spend Rs 10.81 lakh crore this year to create ‘Super Intelligence’ AI. Zuckerberg’s new goal is to create a digital companion that is as intelligent as a human. The future that Zuckerberg named ‘Meta’ is now buried somewhere under AI’s data centers and layers of coding.
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Zuckerberg was calling Metaverse as ‘future’, now it is ‘past’: Even after spending billions of dollars, the virtual world remained away from people; Rs 7.5 lakh crore. lost
