The store, set to open on May 9, is located at the main
campus for Meta's Reality Labs unit, in the Silicon Valley town of Burlingame,
California. The unit is developing the hardware products the company aims to
sell there, including Ray-Ban smart glasses, Portal video-calling devices and
Oculus VR headsets.
With blonde wood and minimalist decor, the store design
echoes the aesthetic pioneered by Apple when it set up retail stores more than
two decades ago.
The opening of the Meta store makes tangible what is largely
a theoretical future business for the world's largest social media company,
which has invested heavily in virtual and augmented reality in a push to build
the "metaverse," a term used to describe immersive, shared virtual
spaces.
Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg says the metaverse could be
the world's next big computing platform, but he has warned that it may take
about a decade for the company's bets to pay off.
In the meantime, with growth slowing and the company still
almost entirely reliant on digital ads for revenue, Meta is cutting back on
some of its long-term investments.
In addition to promoting its hardware devices to consumers,
Meta is increasingly pitching them to businesses. It gave a demonstration at
the store of conference calls that can feature a mix of virtual reality avatars
and traditional video calling.
The company is experimenting with augmented reality
technology that would enable users to join conferences as avatars via Portal,
without donning headsets, said Micah Collins, a director of product management
working on the enterprise tools.
Collins acknowledged the enterprise metaverse business is
nascent, and a spokesperson said most usage of Horizon Workrooms, the VR
conferencing technology, comes from inside Meta. Still, Collins said, the
company senses opportunity.
Although many products are still very early stage and known
in their consumer context, "there's enough there that's giving us a lot of
confidence to attack the space," he said. © Reuters
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