Meta’s Ambitious Plans✴ development of the metaverse continues to cost the company billions of dollars. In its latest financial report for the second quarter, Meta’s Reality Labs division✴which develops augmented and virtual reality technologies, reported an operating loss of $4.48 billion. Industry analysts had forecast a loss of $4.55 billion for the unit.
Image source: Meta✴
The Reality Labs division has posted cumulative losses of more than $50 billion since the end of 2020, CNBC reported, underscoring CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s massive investment in developing new hardware and software that he says will power the next era of personal computing.
Reality Labs’ second-quarter revenue, driven primarily by sales of the Quest family of VR headsets and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses✴amounted to $353 million, which is 28% more than a year earlier ($276 million) for the same reporting period. Analysts expected that the division will bring in a profit of $371 million.
In September Meta✴ introduced the $499 Quest 3 VR headset. A few months later, Apple released the premium $3,500 Vision Pro mixed reality headset. In June, Apple began shipping the Vision Pro in China, where it retails for 29,999 yuan, or $4,141.
Since the VR market is still in its infancy, Meta✴ is increasingly pushing the smart glasses it is developing with Ray-Ban. Mark Zuckerberg believes that recent advances in artificial intelligence and related large language models are key to improving the capabilities of smart glasses.
In July, Ray-Ban parent company EssilorLuxottica CEO Francesco Milleri said Meta✴ plans to become a shareholder in the European eyewear manufacturer and expand the partnership between the two companies, which began in 2020.
The second generation of Meta smart glasses✴ The $299 glasses went on sale last October. In April of this year, Zuckerberg told analysts that there could be a market for “fashionable AI glasses that don’t have a digital display.”
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