During the end of the year holidays, Meta held a series of shows on its experimental platform of immersive experiences, and the participation of the public was well below what could be expected. Although it did not disclose what its intended engagement targets were, it would not be entirely wrong to claim that the numbers were disappointing, as the Futurism website reports.
Between December 26 and 31, three performances by great international pop music stars were promoted on the Horizon Venues platform. Rapper Young Thug, DJ David Guetta and duo The Chainsmokers held individual concerts in different formats. Public participation was free, and it only took one Oculus headset to experience a virtual reality environment.
Despite all the buzz that has surrounded the metaverse since Facebook announced the rebrand to Meta, not many people were aware of the end-of-the-year virtual events, and those who participated weren’t very impressed with the experience, according to Futurism.
The resonance in Meta’s own social networks – Facebook and Instagram – was insignificant and the media specialized in music and technology practically ignored the performances.
Young Thug’s performance did not even reach 100,000 views. David Guetta’s, on the other hand, attracted almost a million users. The performance of the Chainsmokers appears to have been eliminated, so it is no longer possible to know the size of the audience. It should be clarified that these figures take into account visits to the program, but not the actual participation of users.
A good measure of the failure of Meta’s end-of-the-year shows is the performance numbers from DJ Marshmello and Travis Scott, both at Fortnite. While the former mobilized 10 million users in 2019, the latter registered a whopping 27.7 million unique attendees in 2020, right at the beginning of the shutdown imposed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Has the operating system crashed?
If the shows did not generate the expected interest, doubts looming over the development of Meta’s metaverse grew even greater after The Information website reported Wednesday that the company had halted development of an immersive operating system, that incorporates specific characteristics for experiences in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
The news was immediately denied by a company representative in a statement to Bloomberg:
“We are not interrupting or reducing our operations in building a real operating system. The team continues to move forward and we continue to invest in building futuristic computing platforms, as well as devices such as augmented reality glasses and” wearables “that can make our reality. vision of the metaverse. “
According to The Information, Meta would be willing to abandon the project to adopt an open source version of the Android operating system, developed by Google. However, just building its own operating system integrated with its AR and VR devices would make Meta totally independent from competitors like Apple and Google itself.
According to the statements of the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, the creation of its own operating system is key for the company to develop its vision of the metaverse. According to him, immersive and interactive virtual environments will constitute the new phase of the Internet and Meta’s intention is to lead its implementation.
As Cointelegraph recently reported, the New York Times leaked an internal Meta memo in which Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth reveals a willingness to embrace emerging technology features of the cryptocurrency industry, such as NFTs (non-fungible tokens). ) and interoperability in the metaverse implementation.