Meta’s New Vision of the Future Doesn’t Mention the Metaverse Even Once

In case you missed it, Meta CTO and Reality Labs’ head Andrew Bosworth recently published the company’s vision of the future:

Meta began 2022 with a new name and a new vision for the future, and at Reality Labs it’s our job to bring that vision to life. We never thought it would be easy or straightforward, but this year was even harder than we expected. Economic challenges across the world, combined with pressures on Meta’s core business, created a perfect storm of skepticism about the investments we’re making…

[W]e’ve made tough calls this year to stop doing some work so we can maintain focus on those things we feel are most important. But I can say with confidence that after one of the hardest years in the history of the company, Meta remains as committed to our vision for the future as we were on the day we announced it.

Bosworth proceeds to lay out the company’s confidence in its vision, in which VR/AR and mixed reality displays will become a pervasive part of computing.

Notable in its absence:

This new vision of the future from Meta.

Does not mention.

“The Metaverse”.

Not even once.

See for yourself.

Which is pretty interesting! After all, the link in the very first line, “Meta began 2022 with a new name and a new vision“, leads to this post from last year:

Today at Connect 2021, Mark Zuckerberg laid out our vision of the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet — a set of interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you can’t do in the physical world. Importantly, it’ll be characterized by social presence, the feeling that you’re right there with another person, no matter where in the world you happen to be. In keeping with that vision, he also announced a new brand for our company, Meta, to better reflect our focus moving forward. This is an exciting new chapter for the company, and we’re excited to help bring the metaverse to life.

Along with the title itself, the 2021 post mentions “the metaverse” twelve times. It’s quite something to go from a dozen to, well, zero.

The 2022 absence of “the metaverse” leaves one to wonder whether it is one of the things Meta decided to “stop doing some work” on. Not to mention John Carmack, who once called creating the Metaverse “a moral imperative”, just resigned his executive consultant position from Meta. 

And Horizon Worlds, Meta’s metaverse platform, only gets one mention in the 2022 post. This:

It’s not often you get to witness a whole new form of self-expression and community building emerge on a platform, and the ways creators worked their magic on Horizon Worlds this year was a thing to behold.

One wonders how Horizon Worlds’ community feels when they only rate a single sentence.

The irony? Metaverse platforms have already become the leading use case for Meta’s Quest.  Some 3 million Quest 2 users are active users of Rec Room, and based on my research, VRChat is even more popular with Quest 2 users. Their popularity is so pronounced, Carmack (when he was still at Meta) openly stated it was the reason for Quest 2 now costing more.

The second irony: Augmented reality has even less mass market appeal than VR. Quest 2 has an install base of around 15 million, which isn’t huge, but no AR headset comes close. AR/XR applications are not even popular on the iPhone, which has had the technology integrated in it for years. (As I often say: The AR “market” on the iPhone is Pokémon GO… and only Pokémon GO.)  

All that to one side, maybe Meta will reaffirm its commitment to the Metaverse in another announcement? Or explain why they’ve walked away from that term? I’m reaching out a Meta spokesperson and will update this post if I get a reply.