As part of their focus on the Metaverse and the future of virtual reality work, Facebook owner Meta is launching their first retail store, promoting, and selling VR hardware. Adopting a try before you buy approach, the California based store will be opened with the goal of making VR and the Metaverse more accessible and real.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that faith in the Metaverse and a VR future will come through experience, and that the store gives consumers an avenue to do that.
“The best way to understand virtual reality is to experience it,” he said as part of the store’s announcement.
The store will feature products such as the Portal video calling hub, Oculus Quest VR headsets and Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses, all of which consumers are encouraged to interact with.
Major tech organizations are rapidly shutting down their physical stores and opting for an online only marketplace. Microsoft and Amazon are just two examples of such. For a company therefore to promote a purely online future via brick-and-mortar, in person experience seems contradictory. However, avatars and online personas are a big part of the metaverse and aim to replicate real life interaction better than current social media, making the focus on personal interaction a smart move.
Credit: Duncan Rawlinson – Duncan.co / Flickr, CC BY-NC
The Meta retail store will open on May 9th in Burlingame, California. Currently, there is nothing to indicate that Meta will open more stores.
