SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to provide investors with an update on his plan to build the immersive metaverse, which he believes is the future of computing, at Meta’s first in-person conference since the beginning of the pandemic.
The announcements made at Meta Connect, which is Meta’s largest event of the year, will shed light on how Zuckerberg intends to navigate the shift in investor interest towards artificial intelligence from augmented and virtual reality technologies.
The stakes are high for this event, as investors criticized the parent company of Facebook and Instagram last year for its extensive spending on the metaverse. In response, Zuckerberg had to lay off tens of thousands of employees in order to continue funding his vision.
Developers eagerly anticipate discovering what applications they can create for Meta’s latest hardware devices, including the new Quest virtual reality headset set to be released this fall. Investors, on the other hand, will be on the lookout for indications that the gamble, which has cost the company over $40 billion since 2021, will pay off.
One of the main focuses of the day will be AI-powered virtual assistants with unique personalities that Meta plans to integrate into its apps, according to two sources. The plan to announce generative AI chatbots at Connect was initially reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Just before the event, Meta announced that it has fulfilled its plan, first revealed last year, to launch mobile and web versions of its flagship social VR platform Horizon Worlds. Additionally, the company quietly extended its virtual reality avatars to include legs, as observed by the industry blog Upload VR.
(Reporting by Katie Paul and Anna Tong; editing by Miral Fahmy)
Credit: The Star : Tech Feed
