Meta unveils multiple partnerships in bid to advance metaverse usability
Wednesday October 12 2022
Meta employee Dennis Hampton prepares to demonstrate a video game that is played using the Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality headset at the new Meta Store on May 4, 2022 in Burlingame, California. PHOTO | JUSTIN SULLIVAN | GETTY IMAGES | AFP
American tech giant Meta on Tuesday announced several partnerships with other companies from different sectors in a bid to improve the use cases of the novel metaverse technology and to better user experience in the space.
During this year’s Meta Connect event – an annual event organised by Meta to explore the metaverse and its future – the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said virtual and augmented reality are growing and there is need to improve what they can do.
According to Zuckerberg, the sale of applications and games on Meta’s metaverse store yielded over $1.5 billion in the last year, with a third of all the apps making revenues of more than $1 million since February this year.
Data firm Statista estimates that the total market capitalisation of metaverse companies globally as of October last year was $14.8 trillion, while the total market size is $27.96 billion, and is projected to grow to $252.16 billion by 2028.
The partnerships, Zuckerberg said, will help Meta expand metaverse use “beyond gaming and entertainment,” to improve remote working, virtual teams’ management, exercising, and online meeting experiences.
“We believe that the next computing platform has the potential to be more social and more human than anything that’s come before, if we build it correctly,” Zuckerberg said.
“That’s why so much of what we’ve shown today is about improving how we connect and interact, building horizons for social infrastructure for the metaverse, and creating new ways for people to meet and collaborate at work.”
Microsoft, one of the four American tech giants, is among the companies that entered a partnership with Meta, bringing in its workplace tools, including virtual team management platform, Teams, Office365 and the Microsoft Office Suite, into the metaverse.
From this partnership, tools such as Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and Outlook, will now be available in the virtual reality space and users will be able to interact with them and even create or edit content from the metaverse.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, said their “most popular proactivity tools” will be available in Meta’s new ‘Meta Quest Pro’ virtual reality headsets, “to ensure that our software can benefit users across all their favourite devices.”
The new ‘Meta Quest Pro’ headsets, according to Meta’s officials, will offer a better visual clarity and self-tracking controllers to enhance metaverse experience. However, critics say their high cost of $1,500 makes them a target of corporate rather than retail consumers.
Meta also announced a partnership with the maker of popular design tools Adobe to introduce a 3-dimensional modelling software to the virtual reality headsets by next year, a move meant to advance metaverse design beyond professional developers.
A collaboration with video communications company Zoom to advance the experience of online meetings, including by allowing people to appear in Zoom meetings as their Meta avatars while maintaining the capability to fully express their emotions in facial expressions, was also announced.
Other partnerships are with media conglomerate NBCUniversal, which will see its streaming platform Peacock come to Meta Quest, and information technology company Accenture, which will expand Meta’s metaverse products through its software vendor programme.
Mr Zuckerberg said there are also several developments in the metaverse to expect in the near future, many aimed at making the metaverse more usable across platforms and industries to interact, work, or entertain oneself.