The metaverse matters. With numbers to boot.

A recent McKinsey Report showed that Venture Capitalists poured a whopping $120 billion towards startups interested in developing metaverse technology and infrastructure in the first five months of 2022. As per the same report, the value of the Metaverse could reach over $5 trillion by 2030.

And large corporations like Meta are well in the game.

Meta, Rebrand, and Weighing the Losses & Wins

Over the past few years, Meta (previously Facebook) has lost billions of dollars building hardware & software targeting the metaverse. The org is in a very different place than it was a few years ago. User growth is awfully slow, multiple smaller projects are being canceled, and there’s a huge halt in hiring.

That being said, Zuckerberg made it very clear that this isn’t much of a bother to him. Given the nature of his metaverse venture, it’s not likely that Meta will make any significant money over the next few years - and Mark knows that. Through his lens, VR & AR headsets are the next major computing platform, and he backs himself to be the visionary propelling this movement.

It’s been more than a year since Facebook rebranded to Meta. It was back in September 2020 that the last version of the Oculus Quest was released - Oculus Quest 2 - and for 2 years, innovations in software, not hardware, have been leading Meta’s advancement.

Until now.

This year, Meta announced the pro model of the Quest - the Meta Quest Pro, which is vastly different than its predecessor, with a significantly higher price-point, a change in design & plenty of improved features.

The Meta Quest Pro

First things first, how much does it cost? The Meta Quest Pro starts at $1499, in comparison to the Quest 2’s affordable $300 price. This cost includes the headset, the Touch Pro controllers, stylus tips, partial light blockers, and a charging dock.

So why has the price more than tripled? We’ll get into this in a later section. The Quest Pro is aimed at the crossroads of productivity and gaming, built into a headset.

Display

Compared to the Quest 2, the Pro’s display is far superior. The Quest Pro has a higher resolution screen with 37% more pixels than the Quest 2; and with local dimming, it boasts 75% greater contrast.

The Pro also includes the new pancake lenses, which reduce the depth of the optical module by 40% by folding the light several times over. This makes the reading experience a lot smoother & less strenuous because it increases the portion of the screen that is the sharpest.

It will take some time for game developers to design games that can keep up with the Pro’s advanced display capabilities. But as we’ll read later on in this article, the Pro is primarily targeting productivity - so everything from reading & editing documents, internet research & writing code will become a lot more user-friendly and adaptable.

Performance

The Quest Pro is the first device that is powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ chip, making the Pro 50% faster than the Quest 2. The motive is that for productivity users, more often than not, several tabs & applications must be open & running at any given time. Higher processing power is needed.

This use case is different from that of Quest 2, which is predominantly used for gaming. Since games occupy the entire screen, other background apps can be paused, reducing the requirement for a powerful processor.

The Pro also has 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

Design

In the Quest Pro, the major design change is the position of the battery. Here, the battery is located at the back, instead of the front as it was with the previous models. As you can imagine, this would also massively increase comfort levels as the weight is now distributed between the front & the back, as opposed to all the weight being in the front.

For users who want to use their Quest for long durations of time, this new design will be a lifesaver.

Power Add-ons

Considering that you can buy 3 Quest 2s & still have a few hundred dollars left over, it’s no surprise that there are plenty of new features added to the Quest Pro.

Eye tracking

With Meta’s new eye-tracking & natural facial expressions, your social presence is exponentially improved. Your avatar on-screen will be able to match your real-life expressions in hangouts or team meetings. Zuckerberg & Meta have always strived to enhance social technology - to connect people seamlessly. So the addition of non-verbal communication takes a massive leap in the right direction.

Color-passthrough camera

The Quest Pro’s high-resolution color-passthrough camera opens up the world of XR (Cross Reality) - also known as MR (Mixed Reality). Mixed Reality is where VR and AR meet - the ability to wear a Quest Pro and use all of its apps, while also being able to view the real world around you.

For example, imagine this - you’re sitting at your desk with a mouse & keyboard but no physical monitors. All your monitors live inside your Quest Pro and you’re able to clearly view your desk, keyboard, and mouse, while also being able to clearly view all your monitors. That’s the power of Mixed Reality. That’s the future of work.

The Quest Pro Touch Controllers

In the Quest 2, you had to keep your hands & controllers within the headset’s cameras for it to be accurately tracked. With the Quest Pro, tracking has significantly improved, with the headset being able to track your controllers even if your hands are behind your back.

Mixed Reality

Although Mixed Reality is only a part of the Quest Pro experience, it deserves a section of its own. For context, Mixed Reality is the best of Virtual Reality & Augmented Reality combined. It’s where you can see the physical world around you, and overlay virtual objects and applications on them.

In the previous section, the example of you sitting at your desk with a physical mouse & keyboard, along with a virtual monitor is what Mixed Reality looks like.

With the vision of taking VR & AR devices to be the next major computing platform, MR (Mixed Reality) will play a key role until AR technology hits its true potential (which is years away).

In MR, every pixel that you see is rendered by the graphics pipeline in the device, and through the array of cameras on the outside, a 3D view of your surroundings is generated. This removes the separation between VR and the real world, as users can function normally in the real world (move around and see their surroundings) while simultaneously accessing VR applications.

Although MR is still in its 1st version, it’s enough to introduce the concept to the world and more than enough to spark the development ecosystem to start building for it. And that’s the intention behind many of these announcements — to show the world the direction things are going in and give the dev community an incentive to start building use cases & innovating solutions.

Where is Meta going with the Metaverse?

With such big leaps in features & price, there must be a valiant direction that Meta is heading toward with VR & AR. According to Zuckerberg, the Quest Pro isn’t meant for the daily VR consumer - it’s meant for the prosumer. If your VR usage is purely for fun & games, then you’d be more than happy with the Quest 2 and its subsequent successor - the Quest 3 (maybe launching in 2023 and around the same $400 price range).

Productivity

There are over 200 million people buying new PCs every year for their work requirements. This is one of the demographic that Meta is heavily targeting with the Quest Pro. As mentioned earlier, the major focus for the Pro is productivity, and Meta is attempting to fuse productivity & social technology with the Pro.

Mega partnerships with Microsoft, Adobe, Zoom, and others will immensely broaden the spectrum of what AR, VR, and the metaverse is capable of for casual users & business customers.

Microsoft even announced that they are bringing Teams and Office 365 to the Quest devices. This opens up a huge arena of usability for business professionals, especially in the remote working domain. Microsoft & Meta officials stated that they are working to make Teams avatars and Meta avatars to be able to work together in Quest’s Teams.

To take this a step further, Azure Active Directory will also be supported on the Quest Pro and Quest 2 so IT admins can ensure that their company’s devices are secured and managed in the same way that PCs & laptops are managed today.

A similar partnership with Zoom was also announced; with users being able to show up to Zoom calls as their Meta avatars. With the Pro’s eye-tracking technology, video calls will soon appear extremely life-like - further bridging the gap between the physical & virtual.

With the introduction of Movement SDK, Meta avatars can mimic lifelike expressions in real-time with the help of the Quest Pro’s inward sensors. Remote meetings & virtual performances will never be the same again.

Social Experiences

For Meta, the metaverse isn’t (for now) about owning virtual land or buying NFTs. It’s about blending the social experience of being with someone in the real world & the virtual world. If you’ve observed people’s behavior over the past few years on Quest, the majority of time spent by users has shifted from solo apps to multiplayer & social apps - playing games together, hanging out, practicing skills, learning hobbies, etc.

The Pro intends to take this behavior to the next level, with (eventually) photorealistic avatars that blend reality. And with the avatar marketplace, users will be able to customize their avatars to truly represent themselves in the virtual worlds.

When it comes to experiences, on the Meta Quest, Youtube will feel like you’re watching a video in a room full of friends. If you’re hanging out with your friends in Meta Horizon Home, you can flash Youtube on the screen & watch videos together - as if you were sitting together and watching it.

The partnership with NBC Universal will bring NBCU’s content to the metaverse - creating a sense of togetherness even when watching TV shows and movies in VR.

Accessibility

The metaverse isn’t just VR. Meta aims to make the metaverse accessible across all screens & devices. For example, if you’re watching something in VR and want to share it with a friend who doesn't have a VR headset, they can. Friends can plug into the metaverse experience without a headset, through their mobile phones or browsers.

This just reiterates the core mission of connecting people through social technology.

Where is web3 going to fit in?

If you’re wondering about the role web3 will play, you’re not alone. For the longest time, web3 & metaverse have been uttered in the same sentence. But throughout this article, there haven’t been any clear indications of where web3 will play a role.

Every single update mentioned till now has one thing in common - avatars. Every experience is designed around the ability to become a Meta avatar - productivity, social experiences, games, fitness, and events. The biggest need for web3 in this story lies here. Avatar commerce is a massive piece of the metaverse economy.

Human beings by nature have an inherent need to express themselves and create an identity in society. Taking it a step further, most humans also have the need to express their personality & status through materialistic methods - fashion, automobiles, technology, etc. This human desire is what fuels the luxury industries in the physical world.

Why should the virtual world be any different? It too is populated by the same human beings with the same mentalities, just in a different form — an avatar form.

Hence, Avatar commerce is going to be huge for web3. We’re already seeing waves of this in the form of absurdly priced NFTs, whose buyers buy these NFTs mostly with the intention of showcasing their status in the digital world. Perhaps what is the closest example that we’ll see in the future is the NFTs available in web3 games - skins, accessories, land, etc - that users buy and trade.

Avatar Commerce

Meta’s metaverse will take the existing models of NFTs & digital collectibles to a whole new level. Sports teams, fashion brands, TV shows & movies, celebrities, video games, artists, musicians, and many more will be eyeing to cement their position in the metaverse through unique digital collectibles and experiences for their users. NFTs must be used here to prove authenticity.

Meta Avatars will only start out with Meta’s default customization. But soon enough, we’ll all be looking to upgrade our wardrobe to match our style & status. Metaverse events will be a driving factor for this.

Imagine:

If you went to a Justin Bieber concert in real life, you wouldn’t show up wearing your daily clothes, right? You’d probably dress your best - stylish shirts, pants, dresses & sneakers, and some accessories like sunglasses, watches, bracelets, and bags - everything that represents your identity.

So if you went to a metaverse Justin Bieber concert, the same ideology applies. This is where commerce will thrive.

In real life, it takes some effort to notice if someone is wearing a fake brand, but in the metaverse, it’ll be much easier to identify - a simple look into the NFT will tell you whether that watch is an original Rolex or not.

Authenticity will play a key role in metaverse behavior.

Brand Integrations

The metaverse will see brands race to capture user attention. The potential is endless. Brands will be able to set up stores in different apps & events, obviously at a marketing cost - providing a monetization avenue for developers & event organizers.

Customers will be able to shop for their favorite brands and resell items on marketplaces. And as the nature of NFTs goes, the brand will be able to earn money on every resale.

Unique Capabilities

The lens on creativity here is strong, extremely strong. Because the laws of science don’t necessarily apply in the metaverse, the spectrum of creativity is only limited by an artist’s mind.

Imagine a dress that is made of light, or shoes that are made of crawling spiders. Everything that can’t be created in the physical world, can be created in the virtual world - a scary yet fascinating train of thought.

Cryptocurrencies

Where there’s commerce, there must be currency. As of now, all the transactions in Meta are through fiat currency. But it’s not far-fetched to assume that as web3 elements seep into the metaverse, cryptocurrency will surely follow.

Zuckerberg has made it clear that Meta wants to help build an open ecosystem around the metaverse and the Quest, meaning there’s potential for different companies & projects to integrate themselves into the Quest metaverse.

So it’s very likely that cryptocurrencies will eventually become an integral part of commerce inside the metaverse.

How can businesses operate in this new context?

Web3 startups waiting on the sidelines as large corporations invest billions in transforming their platforms and capabilities for the Metaverse need only to consider the history of past technological trends. The transitional trend from the early days of the internet progressed to mobile, crypto, NFTs, Virtual Reality, and now the Metaverse. Instead, they must experiment with the concept and take advantage of the first-mover advantage to capitalize on the new market opportunities and position themselves for success.

In 2017, Zuckerberg stated that his goal is to get 1 billion people into VR. Approximately, Quest 2 has done over 10 million sales. So there’s clearly a long long way to go in the VR movement, and rest assured that Meta will continue to pursue this goal guns blazin’.

With the advancement of VR technology & the focus on social experiences, commerce will play a huge role in adoption. If you see your friend attending exclusive VR concerts of your favorite artist, you’ll obviously feel the need to join. If all your friends are hanging out in Horizon Worlds, you’ll start feeling the FOMO and will feel the need to join.

The domino effect is slow but very real. It’s slow because the barrier of entry is much higher - at least $400 high. But once you’re in, there’s no going back.

As more and more people become virtual, commerce will exponentially grow. This is where businesses can significantly make an impact. Commerce is not limited to only marketplaces. As virtual worlds grow in size, it’s fair game to assume that there will be independent businesses operating within the metaverse, completely separated from the real world. These virtual economies will also be powered by blockchain technology.

The world of video games will also rise above its current state. 1 in 3 apps on the Quest Store makes revenue in the millions. 33 apps have made more than $10M+ in gross revenue. Apps making more than $5M has doubled since last year. But these are web2 games. The changing factor with web3 games is the economies within the games themselves. With millions of NFTs minted and sold on a daily basis, powerful blockchain infrastructure will also become essential for the industry’s survival, along with a developer support ecosystem that allows them to build on top.

The opportunities are all there, and the revolution has only just started.

Final Words

The fruition of Meta’s vision will only be seen in the years to come. Everything is in its primitive state, and many more players will surely enter the game. But all said & done, this movement will only advance with powerful partnerships & collaborations.

Meta has plenty of web2 players partnered to give users a truly immersive experience. However, a web3 player needs to join this arena to take the metaverse to its maximum potential.