News Analysis
Meta has canceled plans for the development of a Quest Pro 2 headset, according to reports in the Information last month. The Pro 2 headset was to be the sequel to Meta’s Quest Pro.
The Quest Pro was the company's VR/AR headset geared at workplace uses, as opposed to its gaming-focused Quest line. Following a year of unprecedented losses at the company's Reality Labs — now totaling more than $21 billion since the beginning of 2022 — the question once again rears its head: is Meta finally throwing in the towel on the metaverse?
The 'Will Meta or Won't Meta' Metaverse Game
When Meta first revealed the Quest Pro the company described it as "… a big step forward in realizing the promise of the metaverse," adding that, “Meta Quest Pro was designed with productivity in mind and will be a major upgrade for those who use VR as a tool for work.”
The news that the company was scaling back production on the Quest Pro and putting the development of Quest Pro 2 on hold followed considerable discussion earlier this year around the company's commitments to the metaverse. At the time, Meta's entry into generative AI was viewed as a sign of shifting priorities. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth dismissed the reports in an expired Instagram Stories post carried by roadtovr.com, writing:
"There is no Quest Pro 2 headset until we decide there is. What I mean by that is there are lots of prototype headsets — lots of them — all in development in parallel. Some of them, we say, 'that’s not the right one,' and we shut it down. Some of them, we say, 'that’s the right one,' and we spin it up,” he wrote. "What you need to understand is, until it goes out the door, it doesn’t get the name."
Related Article: Where the Metaverse and Digital Workplace Meet
A Niching Down
To suggest this is a check on the development of the metaverse is overstating the case, said Liya Safina, a digital product design director and innovation specialist.
She reads it as Meta dissociating its previous approaches to the metaverse to become more focused on specialized applications, a strategy that is known as niching down.
"By niching down we assume development of specialized solutions targeted at specific industries or use cases. Addressing the unique needs and challenges of particular fields," she said.
Here she cites the example of a project like eXpanded eXistence built for Hololens. Its platform, she said, allows a healthcare facility to optimize a surgical procedure, specific to the surgeon and operating room. Surgical technicians can then view and interact with those profiles via mixed reality and within the sterile field of the operating room, granting them access to data and visualization that was previously never available.
In training, niche metaverse innovations can include job-specific simulations that help employees enhance their skills and knowledge in a practical and engaging manner.
“Think high stakes professions like firefighters, police, air traffic control, deep sea diving — all of them simple cannot be trained without VR,” she said. "It's just a matter or years until some of these disjointed mixed reality tools get united into an interactive, global metaverse where remote teams can work together agonistic of geography."
Related Article: The New Metaverse: What's Different This Time?
The Evolving B2B Use Case for the Metaverse
Even if it's true Meta has scaled back its headset plans, there are still business-specific apps in the Meta app store such as Horizon Workrooms, a collaboration platform that uses virtual spaces for meetings and activities, said Damir Kahvedžić, senior global data services manager at ProSearch.
Horizon Workrooms primarily uses virtual reality, although it can also be accessed through a web browser, to support all kinds of work and collaboration within the metaverse.
He noted the changing metaverse strategies of other companies in the B2B space, such as Microsoft, which has discontinued its headset and dissolved its team that was working on a business use for the metaverse. However, the company is still bringing Teams to Mesh, a platform that powers shared immersive experiences. Creators can build custom employee experiences on Mesh that bring people together for new hire onboarding, training, team building and more, he continued.
Apple is also positioning its Vision Pro device for creative professionals to whiteboard ideas, conduct meetings and experience 'facetime' in 3D.
“I would not say that the B2B plans are in freefall, but the use case for conducting meetings and other important work in the metaverse is more difficult than selling it as a consumer device to play games," he said. "The B2B market may just be readjusting as some workers get offline and start going back into the office for work. In the longer run there is a case for a B2B metaverse, and it will gain traction when the technology shortcomings are tackled."
Related Article: Apple Vision Pro Has Clear Uses in the Workplace, Once You Get Past the Price Point
Metaverse Issues
There are several issues in today's early B2B offerings in the metaverse, Kahvedžić added. These include:
1. User Experience
3D virtual devices are heavy, difficult to use, produce headaches for some and have low battery life. They can only be used in short bursts. Apple's idea of replacing the physical workstation with large virtual monitors is a difficult one to sell. Devices need to be lighter and more powerful if there's any expectation that they'll be used continuously. Meta's forthcoming lighter and thinner Quest 3 is a step in the right direction.
2. Graphics
The graphics in the metaverse are not yet business-level quality. He points to the cartoonish avatars in Microsoft and Meta, the latter most famously demonstrated by Mark Zuckerberg himself. While they are fine for socializing and playing games, they aren't ideal for conducting business meetings, serious conversations or other tasks where they might undermine credibility, he said.
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3. Development Is Focused on Gaming Experience
Some of the most popular metaverses are based on games (Roblox, Decentraland, Fortnite). The business market is generally more conservative and slower to adopt. The market is just moving to where the users are.
“I believe that mainstream B2B activity in the metaverse is about six years away, after the avatar and hardware shortcomings are addressed. The technology is just not there today."
Related Article: Building the Technology Behind the Metaverse
The Industrial Metaverse
There is clear evidence that the metaverse is moving into the workplace, albeit in a slightly smaller scale as Liya Safina noted above. Speaking at MIT Technology Review's EmTech, Siemens chief technology and strategy officer Peter Koerte shared how the industrial metaverse is already enabling people to work in a virtual workplace in much the same way they do in the real world.
To do this, organizations are pulling together a number of different innovative technologies that have been in development over the past few years, including the IoT, digital twins, AI and machine learning.
"The industrial metaverse allows you to transfer real-world problems into the digital world, execute them, simulate them, optimize them and move them back into the real world," Koerte said. "The idea of the industrial metaverse is to create much faster solutions with real-world impact."
Metaverse Ain't Going Anywhere
It's still early days for the metaverse, said Mark Varnas, principal SQL Server DBA and consultant at Red9, “I wouldn't count the metaverse out quite yet."
There was a period when metaverse apathy seemed to be on the rise, at least when compared to the PR initiatives promoting the technology, he said. Virtual reality and augmented reality just aren't at the level necessary to see real adoption. Yet metaverse development continues, even with considerable hurdles.
“I would count the simple fact that people do not like wearing headsets as first among them,” Varnas said. “Apple's upcoming Vision Pro release will be a watershed moment, good or bad. Moreover, like all Apple products I would expect future versions of the Vision Pro if the first one does well enough."
He compared the moment to the emergence of the iPhone. That was not a game-changer right out of the gate. Organizations and consumers waited until later versions for the App Store, 3G/4G/5G and video capture, before it became a success. “It could be argued that VR/AR as it is now is not even at the iPhone 1 level compared to what it could be, particularly in the workplace.”