Mark Zuckerberg: Our Work on the Metaverse ‘Is Going To Be of Historic Importance’

On Wednesday (October 26), shortly after Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META) reported its Q3 2022 financial, CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented on his firm’s metaverse-related efforts during the Earnings Conference Call.

According to Meta’s Q3 2022 earnings release, here were some of the highlights for the quarter that ended 30 September 2022:

• “Revenue was $27.71 billion, a decrease of 4% year-over-year, and an increase of 2% yearover-year on a constant currency basis.“
• “Total costs and expenses were $22.05 billion, an increase of 19% year-over-year.“
• “Capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, were $9.52 billion for the third quarter of 2022.“

Based on the transcript by Seeking Alpha, here is are highlights of what the Meta CEO said about the metaverse during the Q3 2022 Earnings Conference Call:

“We just had our Connect conference and announced Quest Pro, which we just started shipping. It’s our new high-end VR headset that delivers high-resolution mixed reality so you can blend virtual objects into the physical environment around you. It’s pretty amazing when you see it, and it’s going to enable all kinds of new experiences and socializing, gaming, fitness and work. And I am really looking forward to seeing what people build with this new capability.

“Work in the metaverse is a big theme for Quest Pro. There are 200 million people who get new PCs every year, mostly for work. And our goal for the Quest Pro line over the next several years is to enable more and more of these people to get their work done in virtual and mixed reality eventually even better than they could on PCs.

“And to deliver a great work and productivity experience, I am excited about the partnerships that we announced with Microsoft, bringing their suite of productivity and enterprise management services to Quest; Adobe and Autodesk bringing their creative tools; Zoom bringing their communication platform; Accenture building solutions for enterprises and more.

“There is still a long road ahead to build the next computing platform, but we are clearly doing leading work here. This is a massive undertaking. And it’s often going to take a few versions of each product before they become mainstream, but I think that our work here is going to be of historic importance and create the foundation for an entirely new way that we will interact with each other and blend technology into our lives as well as the foundation for the long-term of our business...

“There is four major platforms that we are focused on developing. One is the kind of social metaverse platform where you see an early version of that with Horizon with the avatar system… VR is the second major platform. And there, I think that there is going to be a consumer-focused product that probably will reach very large scale, but there is also, I think going to be a work-focused product that – it’s like you don’t do most of your work on a $500 device.

“The two other areas, which are mostly – which are still internal, is a lot of the work on augmented reality, which is a quite a large effort, but we think is going to be just a huge part of the value that gets created over time… And then the fourth platform after the kind of social platforms, VR and AR, is neural interfaces, which I think the kind of risk-based EMG interface, which is for all these computing platforms, there is going to end up being – input is a really important part, how do you basically control the computing platform.

“And we think by the time that you have glasses, and you are kind of walking down the street with glasses, you are not going to have controllers with that, you are not going to want to have your hands kind of like hovering in the air, and you are not always going to want to talk to the thing, even though that’s going to be one way that we use them a bunch of the time. Sometimes you are going to want something that’s more private. So, we think that having a discrete way to basically communicate with the device is going to be critical.“

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