The Meta Connect keynote felt overscripted and “incredibly thirsty”; the long pitch for VR and the metaverse came off as one of tech's hardest sells in a decade
humanize the company and the work in this space in particular — but it just feels forced with these memorized scripts. “Totally.” Ryan Mac / @rmac18 : Also interesting Zuckerberg brings out Accenture CEO Julie Sweet as an example of a biz partnership that will make the metaverse work for enterprises. Lot of buzzwords. Remember, Meta/Facebook paid Accenture $500M a year to outsource content moderation. https://www.nytimes.com/... Tina Nigro / @tina__nigro : Meta wants to make a cool content creation experience for Spark AR in Quest Pro. We had worked on this for 6 years, and last year we even had the ability to export Minsar Studio projects to Spark. It was quite awesome... Ian Sherr / @iansherr : I'm not one to defend Meta these days, but I think we all can tell Mark Zuckerberg is not Steve Jobs or Tim Cook. Thirst or no, the tougher questions are whether this is the right tech at the right time, if Meta is the right company, and if they've found the killer app yet. https://twitter.com/...
TechCrunchDarrell Etherington
Context & Ripple Effects
Meta’s VR push was already rooted in an internal Oculus case for owning the VR market, making Connect a test of whether that hardware strategy could attract enterprise and creator support. A separate assessment of the event likewise found the presentation had failed to answer broad skepticism about the metaverse.
The keynote paired Accenture’s enterprise presence with plans for a Spark AR creation experience on Quest Pro. That puts Meta’s business-partnership narrative and its creator-software roadmap at the center of the product’s credibility.
First-order effects
Meta’s use of Accenture as an enterprise example invites buyers to judge the metaverse pitch alongside Meta/Facebook’s existing $500M-a-year content-moderation outsourcing relationship with the consulting firm, rather than as a standalone customer validation.
The announced Spark AR work makes Quest Pro’s creator experience an immediate delivery test for Meta: the company must translate a stage demonstration into usable software.
Second-order effects
Quest Pro’s later criticism for poor software and an unclear purpose raises the bar for Meta’s creator tooling, since better controllers alone do not establish a compelling platform for developers or enterprise users.
Zuckerberg’s subsequent discussion of selling Quest 3 at break-even or a loss to grow the ecosystem suggests Meta may need hardware economics to support adoption while its software and enterprise case remain under scrutiny.
Third-order effects
If this pattern persists, Meta’s immersive-computing strategy will be judged less by control of VR hardware than by its ability to build a credible two-sided ecosystem of creators, software, and enterprise customers.
Enterprise partners may become more important as proof points, but vendor relationships will carry limited persuasive weight unless Meta’s products supply clear software value.
The trend: Meta’s VR strategy is shifting from a hardware-ownership ambition toward the harder task of proving a software and partner ecosystem can create sustained demand.
my litmus test for “is your VR metaverse app even remotely as good as vrchat” is “are furries holding actual exercise classes in it” https://twitter.com/...
Content aside, the fake conversation staging of #MetaConnect is just weird and awkward. I get the intent — humanize the company and the work in this space in particular — but it just feels forced with these memorized scripts. “Totally.”
Also interesting Zuckerberg brings out Accenture CEO Julie Sweet as an example of a biz partnership that will make the metaverse work for enterprises. Lot of buzzwords. Remember, Meta/Facebook paid Accenture $500M a year to outsource content moderation. https://www.nytimes.com/..…
Zuck is currently talking a big game about openness as a principle for VR computing, not-so-implicitly contrasting it with the mobile platforms Facebook grew up on.
Meta wants to make a cool content creation experience for Spark AR in Quest Pro. We had worked on this for 6 years, and last year we even had the ability to export Minsar Studio projects to Spark. It was quite awesome...
I'm not one to defend Meta these days, but I think we all can tell Mark Zuckerberg is not Steve Jobs or Tim Cook. Thirst or no, the tougher questions are whether this is the right tech at the right time, if Meta is the right company, and if they've found the killer app yet. https…
Some more thoughts since tweets aren't big enough: @Meta has clearly positioned the #QuestPro and Mixed reality as the development environment for #AR apps with the Spark AR announcement, and I think that's probably the biggest development we're seeing, even though its obvious.
do people want to use VR/mixed reality headsets for work? i can see why it would be helpful for a select group of people, but i just don't understand how it becomes a mass-market work/all-purpose device like a laptop.
@Techmeme @etherington Overscripted, under rehearsed, and really odd camera direction. I was never sure if the chroma keyed in execs were in the same room or not as the sight lines were all over the place. More 4th wall breaking than Fleabag.
If you don't think AR/VR is the most interesting thing in Interaction Design, Creative Tools, and Future of Work, you are crazy. Fine, generative AI could be argued as being near or more exciting, but give me one more thing that is in the same league as the 2 above!? https://twit…
This is interesting! Meta is launching a “fitness accessory bundle” to market VR to people who use it for workouts and cardio. This is one area I can really see Meta/VR serving a dedicated market in a way almost no other device really can.
meta is building an amazing next-generation technology that's going to revolutionize everything, and to prove it here's another badly rendered simulacrum of our already charisma-challenged leader https://twitter.com/...
.@Accenture is now talking about its 700,000 employees and its remote workforce and using #VR to create virtual spaces where its employees can get together and have deployed over 60,000 Quest headsets. #MetaConnect2022 https://twitter.com/...
I watched Meta Connect via my Quest 2 headset. Some counter said there were 5.7K people in the keynote theater at one point, though only 14 in my instance of it. Everyone in the theater rushed to the front to see Zuck's new avatar. It... did not look good.
I am really surprised how bad that experience was to try to watch the #metaconnect show in VR. They built a whole area and stage and screen called Meta Square for the event and... the keynote wasn't there. The event stage wasn't actually the stage the show was on? Why so messy?
Zuckerberg's like, “Hey here's some actually pretty cool technology we're developing, presented in the most boring, cringey way we could come up with.”
Mark Zuckerberg is basically Todd Howard of VR. Every time he speaks he just ignores the rest of VR as a whole and says he's got the most innovative idea, but its still behind by like 2 years. We have elbow tracking and shit now. Did they finally figure out foot tracking?!