Is Zuck too early to the metaverse?

Yesterday, Meta held Meta Connect, an annual event dedicated to the company’s latest releases in AR and VR.

The event summarized the company’s progress over the last year and gave a sneak peek at where its platforms are heading.

First, Meta’s good news

Meta made promising announcements across its most important VR use cases, including:

• Social experiences: A partnership with NBCUniversal that will let users interact in a VR world modeled after “The Office”
• Gaming: A previously announced Iron Man VR game will be released on Nov. 3
• Fitness: An “active pack” for Meta’s Quest 2 headset that can better handle sweat
• Work: An integration with Microsoft that will make its apps available in VR

Meta also announced the Meta Quest Pro, a mixed reality headset that retails at $1,499 (compared to $399 for the Meta Quest 2).

But it’s not all good news

On Monday, Platformer’s Casey Newton detailed Zuck’s struggles to get employee buy-in on the metaverse:

• In one survey, only 58% of Meta employees said they understood the company’s metaverse strategy.
• Meta leadership recently complained to managers that employees aren’t using the company’s Horizon VR platform enough.

One issue, Newton poses, is that the company’s metaverse efforts are too early, and that employees are more interested in working on projects where they can have an immediate impact.

For what it’s worth, Zuck didn’t exactly refute that — in his opening keynote, he dedicated the event to “the people who would rather be early than fashionably late.”