Mark Zuckerberg believes that the metaverse is the future of the internet, until his company uses the name Meta as the parent of Facebook. But indeed, building a metaverse is not cheap, it requires a lot of capital.
To take care of the development of the metaverse, Meta has a special division called Reality Labs. Now in the latest Meta financial report, the division lost USD 10 billion in 2021 alone.
In previous years, the Reality Labs division also suffered high losses, although not as big as last year. As quoted by us from CNBC, in 2019, the loss was USD 4.5 billion and USD 6.62 billion in 2020.
Reality Labs develops virtual reality headset technology as well as augmented reality, both in terms of hardware and software. Users who want to enter the world of the metaverse use this device, but so far it has not been too mainstream.
Meta will prioritize the development of the metaverse, which has recently been Zuckerberg's ambition. "Our goal is to help the metaverse reach billions of people," Zuckerberg said recently.
But it seems, Zuckerberg must be prepared to bear the loss for a long time. The metaverse ecosystem is still in its very early stages, although Reality Labs' VR headsets are increasingly being sold.
The good news is that some experts say 2022 is the time for the metaverse to take off. The condition is that technology giants other than Facebook also launch their own technology for the metaverse.
"Large technology platforms that have benefited from the explosion of mobile computing applications now see augmented reality as a shift in computing platforms for the future," said Goldman Sachs analyst Eric Sheridan.