Snap is not the only social media company with smart glasses and a growing hardware portfolio, but what sets its approach apart from Meta? While announcing Pixy, a $ 229 drone taking off from your hand to take selfies, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel spent some time explaining his decision to focus on experiences built for the real world instead of the virtual metavers.
“The reason we do not use that word is because it is quite ambiguous and hypothetical,” he said. The Guardian. “Just ask a space of people how to define it and everyone’s definition is completely different. “
Spiegel also told The Verge’s Alex Heath that companies that make metaverse pitches “really talk about something that doesn’t exist yet,” as opposed to augmented reality, where “there are 250 million people engaging with AR every day in just the Snapchat app.” These AR interactions include everything from the silly selfie effects that Snap made popular years ago to more advanced shopping experiences.
While they disagree on the meta-verse, Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg agree that AR glasses will one day be big. Zuckerberg has called them the “holy grail” device, and Spiegel has said that AR glasses will be the key to overlay computing on the world around you. Zuckerberg’s first genuine pair of AR glasses will not arrive until at least 2024, while Spiegel already has AR glasses being tested by developers today.
Zuckerberg’s vision for the future also includes virtual reality headsets to power the metaverse he spends billions of dollars on building. He calls it an “embodied internet” full of holograms and virtual boardrooms that people will increasingly spend time on through headsets strapped to their faces. It’s a maximalist, escapist vision of where the internet, and how we interact with it, is headed.
On the contrary, here is what Spiegel told The Verge’s Heath last week: “Our basic thesis and our big bet is on the real world and that people really enjoy spending time together in real life. And that computer can really improve it, [and] make it more fun and contribute to shared experiences. ”
“But in the end, people are going to spend the vast majority of their time in the world because it really is a wonderful place … And that’s why we’re talking very specifically about the products we have today, about the solutions that exist today and about the way people use our products instead of talking in hypothetical terms. “