At Meta Connect 2022, the company’s annual developer conference for its VR efforts and Oculus hardware platform, the company announced a lot of stuff — but what it communicated more effectively than anything else was just how incredibly thirsty — one might even say desperate — Mark Zuckerberg is for his metaverse bet to pay off.
Before I get ahead of myself, let me be clear that I understand all of these prerecorded presentations given by large tech companies are extended advertisements. No one’s disputing that, but Zuck’s overscripted and overproduced dev event keynote today was easily the hardest sell for not just a product or a platform, but the premise upon which it’s based, I can ever recall seeing in a decade in tech.
The presentation basically kicked off with Mark assuring us that VR is bigger than ever, though almost entirely in relative terms. It’d be hard for it not to be, given the pace of its growth to date since its advent (counting either from the days of the first VR headsets or what you might call “the modern era,” when the original Oculus Rift finally made its ways to consumers in 2016. It then went into a series of cherry-picked revenue numbers set up by Facebook CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a direct appeal to an ecosystem in need of fleshing out. These were mostly individual highlights, however, rather than the cumulative rapidly incrementing ecosystem numbers that Apple used to balloon its own mobile App Store efforts through its early days.