Reporting by XinZhiyuan
Edit: Peach La Yan
【New Wisdom Meta Guide】Following the launch of the supercomputer with Nvidia, Meta laid out the next big move of the meta-universe and added a 3D avatar to its platform. In addition, Meta will announce its fourth quarter results on Wednesday. Running all out to the metaverse, meta earned?
How hot is the metaverse?
No, at the Spring Festival Gala of the Year of the Tiger, Shen Teng participated in the sketch "Not Yet Returned", and repeatedly compared himself to "DogKing in the Meta universe".
Following the collaboration with Nvidia to sacrifice the metaverse "giant beast" supercomputer, Meta layout metaverse's next big move: adding 3D avatars to Instagram.
So, has the meta-universe made money for so long? Exciting times are coming!
On Wednesday, Meta will announce its fourth quarter results. At that point, many will see if Zuckerberg's "vision for the future" can generate significant revenue for the company.
3D avatar cross-platform, small za seconds become "bald head strong"
Meta announced on Monday that it will introduce 3D avatars on the Instagram platform and update the avatars of 3D virtual avatars on Facebook and Messenger.
People in North America can appear as avatars through stickers, live posts, Facebook ID images, and more meta platforms, including Quest VR.
The new avatar will include new facial shapes to bring Avatar closer to the real you. At the same time, it also considers disabled users, adding elements such as cochlear implants, hearing aids and wheelchairs.
In addition, Meta has added new eyes, nose, beard, hairstyle, clothing, body type, and more to the editor.
Aigerim Shorman, head of the Meta project, wrote in a blog post,
Since we demonstrated Meta's long-term vision for the metaverse at Connect in 2021, we've been building the next future. There, you can sit in the same room and talk with loved ones thousands of miles apart, and you can work with a remarkable team across borders. These virtual human 3D avatars further fuel Meta's ambitions to enter the virtual world.
Zuckerberg said the metaverse is a top priority for the company, which he talked about when announcing Meta's new name last year.
Meta showed a demo of Codec Avatars and real-time environment rendering in October, but the company stressed at the time that much of the work was still in the research phase.
Zuckerberg said in a post on Monday, "One day, you'll have multiple avatars from expressive to realistic."
Looking at Xiao Za's head, there is a feeling that the wood has a strong bald head?
In addition, Meta has launched the LVI-themed Super Bowl T-shirt for virtual avatars on its platform.
Run to the "meta-universe", Meta make money?
Zuckerberg has said that the metaverse is the successor of the mobile Internet, that is, the next Internet.
On October 31 last year, Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta at the annual Connect conference and will invest tens of billions of dollars to go all out into the metacosm.
At the time, the company came up with a vision of any place one wanted to go through virtual reality avatars.
It can be said that Facebook's name change is a cloud arrow, which triggered a follow-up meta-universe investment boom.
Subsequently, Microsoft officially announced its entry into the metaverse at the Ignite conference on November 2 and launched the mixed reality conference platform Mesh.
On November 9, three virtual people from NVIDIA's Avatar platform also appeared at GTC 2021, defining the Omniverse platform as "engineer's metacosm".
Unity spent $1.6 billion on Nov. 10 to buy Avatar's behind-the-scenes special effects company, Weta.
Global technology giants have set sail intensively on the metaverse track, accelerating the layout of the metacosm. Domestic companies like Byte, Xiaoice and so on have also entered the game.
The question is, what exactly will be the rewards of the new terms that many people talk about in 2021?
In its upcoming earnings report tomorrow, Meta plans to announce for the first time the results of its augmented and virtual reality hardware division, Reality Labs.
The division, led by new CTO Andrew Bosworth, includes sales of Oculus devices and other AR/VR hardware and related software and content.
The company has previously revealed that this investment in the meta-universe will result in a $10 billion reduction in the company's profits in 2021 and will not be profitable at any time in the near future.
Currently, Meta is also recruiting engineers extensively and acquiring several virtual reality game studios to build virtual worlds.
Many investment analysts say they'd love to see metrics of Meta's Reality Labs' profitability, how long it could drag down advertising, evidence of sales efforts around VR headsets.
Mark Mahaney, a senior internet analyst at Morgan, estimates that Reality Labs should have revenues around $2.7 billion in 2021.
Stephanie Llamas, a virtual reality market analyst at VoxPop, said, "Reality Labs is a magnifying glass, and for me, it will be a big point of view, and there will be no need to surgically tap into meta's benefits."
Meta said it expects "non-ad revenue to go down year-over-year" in the fourth quarter as it is slightly inferior to the Popular VR Quest 2 headset for the Christmas holidays.
Currently, Meta did not announce Quest 2 headset sales, but a recall notice for quest 2 facial foam pads in July said the product sold about 4 million units in the United States.
The data shows that the Oculus app topped the U.S. App Store download charts on Christmas Day, surpassing TikTok in terms of downloads. Meanwhile, the Oculus Quest 2 has also become the most popular gift this Christmas, surpassing xbox and PS.
International Data Corp. estimates that Facebook sold about 6.8 million virtual reality headsets last year, up from an estimated 3.5 million the year before. It currently accounts for more than half of the AR/VR headset market share.
It can be said that Meta is making a lot of money this holiday season.
However, investors are most concerned about the performance of Meta's core digital advertising business. The tech giant, which owns the world's second-largest digital advertising platform after Google, said in October that it would face "enormous uncertainty" in the fourth quarter.
It could face an ongoing blow from changes to Apple's privacy policy that make it difficult for Facebook and Instagram to effectively use targeting systems and ad serving features on Apple's app platform.
Pedro Palandrani, a research analyst at Global X, said the metacosm is a "long story," but in the near term, investors will be watching how Meta responds to Apple's policies.
Meta reportedly earns around $86 billion in 2020, but it has yet to explain in detail how to make money in the metaverse.
Meta said total spending is expected to reach $70-71 billion in 2021 and more than $91-97 billion in full-year 2022.
According to Wall Street forecasts, Meta expects revenue of $33.38 billion, up 18.9% year-over-year, and expects quarterly earnings per share to be $3.84, down slightly.
And some stories you don't know
How did Facebook become Meta? The Wall Street Journal reported its specifics.
At the end of last year, an Instagram engineer packed his bags and prepared to take a vacation break in December. But at this time, his boss pulled him aside and had to take him to a virtual meeting, mainly talking about the work goals for 2022.
However, the style of their conversation changed, and the boss made him forget his original job goals and instead let him find new positions in the growing ar and VR fields. The boss said, "If you want to be successful at Meta you have to make a change."
The engineer, who has worked at Instagram for more than three years, declined to give his real name for fear of retaliation. He wants to apply for a new job, but hasn't decided what to do yet.
Meta, formerly known as Facebook. Zuckerberg has completely upended his company since betting on metaversals last October. His company will introduce people to a shared virtual world across different software and hardware platforms.
Employees say Meta has undergone a complete transformation since the name change. It created thousands of new jobs to produce the software and hardware needed for the metaverse. Meta's managers want employees who previously worked on social networking products to apply for AR and VR-related positions.
Meta also poached metaversary engineers from competitors including Microsoft and Apple. It has officially renamed some products, such as their Oculus virtual reality headset.
It has to be said that this name change and the storm of entering the meta-universe are comparable to the storm caused by Zuckerberg's announcement that Facebook will shift from desktop to mobile devices in 2012.
At the time, Facebook restructured, focusing most of its energy and resources on making a variety of mobile-friendly products. The change was so successful that it brought years of growth to Facebook.
But now it's different, and it's even more challenging to drastically change the direction of the company again. Meta has more than 68,000 employees, more than 14 times as many as in 2012. Its market capitalization grew more than 8-fold during that period to $840 billion, and the business was rooted in online advertising and social networks.
While this shift may give Meta a head start in the next phase of the Internet's development, metaverse is still largely a theoretical concept — unlike when Facebook transformed in 2012, smartphones were already largely ubiquitous.
According to nine Meta employees, the name change caused internal chaos.
While some employees are excited about meta's shift, others question whether Meta rushes into new products without addressing the spread of misinformation and extremism on Facebook.
One employee said, "Employees should have a positive attitude, whether it is to support transformational innovation or resign and leave." Some people who didn't approve of the transformation have left."
Two employees said it is still unknown what the metacosm means for the company's existing social networking products. They say that both Facebook and some teams on Instagram have undersized over the past four months, and budgets in the second half of 2022 will also be lower than in previous years.
On the upcoming quarterly earnings, a Meta spokesperson said, "Building a metacosm is not the company's only priority."
Facebook's shift to a metacosm began at its top.
In September, Mike Schroepfer, a longtime chief technology officer, said he would step down by the end of 2022. Zuckerberg has appointed Andrew Bosworth to take over, where he has led the development of products such as Oculus headphones and Ray Ban Stories smart glasses for the past few years.
Bosworth's baton sends a signal that Zuckerberg is serious about virtual reality and virtual worlds. The two met in an artificial intelligence class at Harvard, when Zuckerberg was a student and Bosworth was a teaching assistant. After Zuckerberg dropped out of college, they kept in touch. Eventually, Bosworth moved to Silicon Valley to work for Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg later turned to Bosworth for help. In 2012, Bosworth was tasked with building Facebook's mobile advertising products. After management issues arose in Oculus' virtual reality division, Zuckerberg appointed Bosworth to take over the program in August 2017. The VR business was later renamed Reality Labs.
In October 2021, Meta said it would create 10,000 metaverse-related jobs in the EU over the next five years. That same month, Zuckerberg announced that he would change Facebook's name to Meta and pledged to spend billions of dollars on it.
Employees say Reality Labs is now at the forefront of the company's transition to a metacosm. Employees who are passionate about product, engineering and research are applying for relevant new positions, while others are being promoted in traditional social networking departments, emphasizing metaversities in social networks and continuing to lead the work, they say.
Of the more than 3,000 vacancies listed on Meta's website, more than 24 percent are AR or VR-related positions. Jobs are available in cities such as Seattle, Shanghai and Zurich.
Meta has changed its name for three months, and what many people are most looking forward to is tomorrow's earnings data.
Resources:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-owner-meta-lift-veil-off-its-metaverse-business-2022-01-31/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/technology/facebook-meta-change.amp.html
https://about.fb.com/news/2022/01/updates-to-avatars/