Breakdown
- Meta's augmented reality and virtual reality division, Reality Labs, has lost almost $4 Billion in the first quarter of 2024.
- Their AR and VR endeavours have cost them $45 Billion already.
- Despite all this spending, people are still unwilling to adopt AR and VR technology on a wider scale.
Meta(formerly known as Facebook) has reported record profits recently, and the same is true for the latest quarter. However, the company's virtual reality and augmented reality division has bled nearly 4 Billion dollars in the first quarter alone.
Meta's AR and VR division, known as Reality Labs, has lost almost $3.85 billion, according to a report by CNBC. Yes, this is the same division responsible for developing the affordable and relatively popular Meta Quest 2 and the pricier but state-of-the-art Meta Quest 3.
The company expects this trend to continue and stated, "We continue to expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year".
However, this is nothing compared to the actual losses the company has suffered in their pursuit of VR and AR supremacy. Meta started reporting the losses for Reality Labs separately starting in 2020. If you look at these reports, the figures will show you that with the exception of a single quarter, Reality Labs has lost $2 Billion every quarter.
If we sum up the total losses and costs of advertising, development, and sales, Meta has reportedly spent over $45 Billion on Reality Labs and their pursuit of AR and VR(source: Kotaku)
Meta is one of the earliest adopters of virtual reality and has spent billions of dollars trying to craft the Metaverse and lead the market when it comes to VR. However, we're nowhere near the future Mark Zuckerberg envisions, where everyone is going around with an AR or VR headset.
There's a lengthy discussion that could be had regarding why AR and VR technology has not been widely adopted yet and how the Metaverse was a terrible idea. However, we can summarise it with two key points. People don't want VR, and people especially don't want VR in its current state.
Currently, VR requires way too much setup and hardware to use, and even then, it feels like taping a monitor on top of your face. There are barely any genuine use cases for VR for the ordinary person, and even the available games library is terrible despite a decade of development.
AR and VR are ambitious projects that won't be taking off anytime soon until significant breakthroughs are made in the field. Meta is clearly banking on this and hoping to be the ones to make these breakthroughs and capitalise on their much-anticipated age of VR.