Meta opens first shop

The first physical Meta Store opens in California in May. You can try out the latest Metaverse technology in the shops.

Who would have thought it? Facebook is opening a store. In the Meta Store, the company wants to demonstrate what is possible with its own hardware today and provide a first insight into the metaverse. On display are the AR-compatible Portal video chat devices, the Ray-Ban Stories camera and audio glasses and the self-sufficient VR glasses Meta Quest 2.

Further device classes are planned for the future. According to a roadmap leak, Meta plans to introduce a smartwatch this year and launch two ambitious Metaverse devices in 2024: data glasses (Hypernova) that are paired with a smartphone and display notifications in the field of vision and more advanced AR glasses (Project Nazare) that can display holograms.

Get up close and personal with VR and AR

The Meta Store is all about touching and trying things out. Visitors can make video calls with Portal in a special demo area, put on the Ray-Ban Stories and take photos from the perspective of the eye or play a round of Quest 2.

The total area of the Meta Store is 150 square metres. The shop is located near the Reality Labs headquarters in Burlingame, California. Reality Labs is the name of the 18,000-strong division that develops Metaverse technology.

Demystifying the metaverse

The fact that Meta is not opening in a major city shows the provisional nature of the project. According to the company, it first wants to experiment and gather feedback.

Meta has time. The company knows that the Metaverse is still in its infancy and that the devices on show, apart from perhaps Quest 2, do not yet have much to do with Mark Zuckerberg's grand vision. The Portal devices are capable of simple AR effects, but only on one screen, while the Ray-Ban Stories doesn't even have a display.

"We don't sell the metaverse in our shop, but we hope people will go out and know a bit more about how the products connect them to the metaverse," says Meta Store boss Martin Gilliard.

Meta has also launched a shop on the official Meta website where its own products are sold.

Source: Mixed