Visori, Meta cuts the “La Jolla” project: goodbye to the Apple Vision Pro competitor
It is now clear to everyone that sales of the Oculus Quest , the bizarre plastic contraption that you put on your nose to access the metaverse, do not satisfy Meta. But in addition to the restructuring of the Reality Labs team, in Menlo Park they are also studying a strategic repositioning on viewers. The password? Contain costs. All the details
La Jolla, goodbye. According to the newspaper The Information , Meta, Facebook's parent company, is among the staunchest supporters of the metaverse (they believed in it so much, in the Menlo Park area, that they called the holding company unequivocally) in its silent and slow retreat from the virtual lands left desolate, it would also have decided to stop the development of its most advanced virtual reality viewer designed with the sole task of competing with the Apple Vision Pro.
DOES LA JOLLA STAY ON THE SHELF?
The device, known internally by the code name “La Jolla”, had been in development since November last year. A development reinvigorated by Apple's entry into the field of a market, that of viewers, previously abandoned by Google and in fact also by Sony.
The goal of Big Tech led by Mark Zuckerberg was to launch it in 2027. Like the Cupertino company, La Jolla should also have been equipped with a MicroOLED display, a technology that is currently still quite expensive.
And it may be that these were precisely the last, rumored moves of the giant led by Tim Cook (according to the media, Cupertino is hastily preparing a weakened and reduced-price version of its viewer, dissatisfied with the sales of the Apple Vision Pro ) to convince Meta to stop the development of the wearable device, abandoning it in a drawer.
WHAT HAPPENED TO LA JOLLA
In fact, the recent statement released by Andrew Bosworth , CTO of Meta, to those who asked him for news on La Jolla sounds like an epitaph: “We always have many prototypes in the development phase. Not everyone makes it to production. We move forward with some, set aside others. Decisions like this – explained the manager – are made continuously and stories based on rumors regarding a single decision will never give the complete picture”.
META FOCUSES ON LOW-COST VIEWERS AND HI-TECH GLASSES
According to recent rumors, Meta is currently focusing on other wearable devices: not only is it interested in continuing its collaboration with Ray Ban to the point of moving on the financial front , but it has already established a partnership with Snap led by Evan Spiegel for compatible glasses with Augmented Reality.
While, in the field of headsets the watchword would be "to contain costs" and the company would be focusing everything on Ventura, the economical variant of the Quest that Menlo Park would like to release by the Christmas holidays (therefore by November, considering that the US window opens on Thanksgiving Day).
META REFURBISHES THE METAVERSE
What is certain is that for Meta it is now imperative to contain costs on the internal front as well. In the last period it first canceled Grand Theft Auto probably to avoid the flop already experienced with Ubisoft, a French software house that had created a popular exclusive for the Meta viewer: Assassin's Creed Nexus VR , then ordered the closure of the internal studio Ready at Dawn . The team led by Andrea Pessino had joined Oculus Studio in the midst of the pandemic, in June 2020. Previously Meta had acquired two other studios: Beat Games and Asgard's Wrath.
Moreover, the main division dedicated to headsets and metaverse, Reality Labs, will also have to face a 20% cost reduction by 2026, the year in which the new VR headsets Meta Quest 4 and Quest 4s are expected to be launched.
As Start Magazine had reported , the team is insisting on the group's accounts with as much as $8.3 billion in losses. All data that leads us to believe that Mark Zuckerberg wants to stay on the project as long as he keeps the costs and losses linked to a device that never really took off under control.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/visori-meta-la-jolla/ on Sun, 01 Sep 2024 13:53:00 +0000.