Snap isn’t the only social media company with smart glasses and an expanding hardware portfolio, but what separates its approach from Meta? while announcing Pixy, a $229 drone that takes off from your hand To capture selfies, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel spent time explaining his decision to focus on experiences built for the real world rather than the virtual metaverse.
“The reason we don’t use that word is because it’s quite ambiguous and hypothetical,” he said. The Guardian. “Just ask a room of people how to define it, and everyone’s definition is totally different.”
Spiegel also said the edge Alex Heath that companies doing metaverse pitches “are really talking about something that doesn’t exist yet,” as opposed to augmented reality, where “there are 250 million people who interact with AR every day on the Snapchat app alone.” Those AR interactions include everything from the fun selfie effects that Snap made popular years ago to more advanced shopping experiences.
While they disagree with the metaverse, 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 key to superimposing computing on the world around you. Zuckerberg’s first true pair of AR glasses won’t arrive until at least 2024, while Spiegel already has AR Spectacles is being tested by developers today.
Zuckerberg’s vision of the future also includes virtual reality headsets to power the metaverse that is spending billions of dollars to build. He calls it an “embedded internet” full of holograms and virtual boardrooms in which people will spend more and more time through headsets strapped to their faces. It is a maximalist and escapist view of where the Internet is headed and how we interact with it.
On the contrary, this is what Spiegel said the edge Heather last week: “Our fundamental thesis and our great bet is in the real world, and that people really enjoy spending time together in reality. And that computing can really improve that, [and] make it more fun and contribute to shared experiences.”
“But ultimately people are going to spend most of their time in the world because it’s really a wonderful place… And that’s why we talk very specifically about the products that we have today, about the solutions that exist. today, and about the way people use our products, instead of talking about hypotheticals”.