Meta cancels next-gen headset as Reality Labs remains mired in VR

There’s more to the metaverse than hardware, and Mark Zuckerberg appears to be learning that lesson the hard way.

Meta’s metaverse ambitions may not be going as well as planned. The company’s Realty Labs division reportedly stopped work on a next-generation headset amid concerns the product wouldn’t sell well enough to justify its production. 

According to a report from The Information, workers were given the cease order after CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed-in during a product update meeting. Evidently, Meta was expecting Apple’s Vision Pro — a product similar to the one Reality Labs was developing — to perform better than it has.

Headsets and the Metaverse

Despite involvement from some of the top technology firms in the world, including Sony, HTC, Meta, and Google, virtual reality hardware remains a niche market. As far as consumers are concerned, VR remains a niche product.

As Cointelegraph recently reported more than half of the Fortune 100 uses Apple’s Vision Pro spatial computing headsets, and VR/AR headset use in the industrial metaverse continues to grow, but consumers just aren’t catching on.

Part of the problem is that a certain percentage of the population experiences VR sickness. Another is that a presumably larger percentage don’t want to walk around in public with a computer strapped to their face.

There are products in development to address. Meta and RayBan, for example, have had some success with their partnership to integrate AI tech into stylish eyewear. But there’s simply no telling if and when virtual reality is going to have its iPhone moment.

The cross-platform metaverse

In what may be a primary example of putting the horse before the cart, there still doesn’t appear to be a killer app for the metaverse when it comes to virtual and augmented reality. Developers have largely taken an “if you build it, they will come” approach to creating VR hardware.

Unfortunately, aside from the wow factor, there aren’t many things headsets can do that smartphone screens can’t. Ideally, consumers wouldn’t be forced to choose between one medium or another.

In the Web3 industry, for example, it’s common practice to develop device agnostic metaverse experiences. Typically, this is to foster interest in the platform, product, and service as most Web3 developers don’t have the financial resources to develop cutting-edge hardware.

The disconnect between big tech’s hardware ambitions and the boots-on-the-ground approach being developed by independent developers and the small-by-comparison companies in the Web3 industry could be a contributing factor to continuing consumer disinterest on both ends.

Related: Deciding who owns your ‘digital twin’ will make or break the metaverse