Meta recently announced plans to open its first meta-universe physical store, Meta Store, in its campus in Burlingame, California, which is expected to open on May 9. Here, consumers are free to experience and purchase all of the company's hardware offerings, including quest series headsets, Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses and Portal video calling devices.
It is understood that the store covers an area of 1550 square feet, Meta's physical retail space will also provide a unique demonstration area for quest 2 VR headsets, visitors can experience a variety of popular VR games, such as "Beat Saber", "GOLF+", "Real VR Fishing" and "Supernatural". Meanwhile, their VR gameplay plays in real time onto a giant curved LED screen that looks like it's taken straight out of a sci-fi movie, and players even get a 30-second mixed reality clip video that Meta gives away for free.
Martin Gilliard, head of meta store, said: "Meta Store is designed to help people understand how our products will be the door to the future of metaverse, we will not sell metaverse in our store, but hopefully people will learn more about how our product will help them connect with it when they come in and out. Opening a store in Burlingham allows us to experiment and always embed the consumer experience in the development process, and what we learn here will help define our future retail strategy." ”
The Meta Store will open to the public on May 9 at 322 Airport Blvd in Burlingham, California, and is open Monday through Friday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time. Visitors can purchase the Meta Quest 2 as well as a selection of Quest 2 accessories. The company has also added a new store label to the Meta.com to streamline the online ordering process.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether Meta will be able to do so, and other store opening plans are uncertain for the time being. But for tech giants that have also entered offline stores, with the exception of Apple, the performance of the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon has not been satisfactory. Microsoft, for example, has permanently closed all its retail stores in 2020.