Meta continues to invest billions of dollars in its AR/VR Reality Labs division, despite losses of more than $1 billion each month for most of the past two years.
The latest release from the owner of Facebook and Meta Quest is a revamped range of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which strip the company's hardware down to a pair of designer specifications.
New features here include video calling and an AI that can answer questions based on what you're watching. But Reality Labs as a whole is still nowhere near turning a profit, and has said in its latest financial results that it expects losses to increase as it deepens its investment.
In the financial quarter ending March 31, Reality Labs posted $440 million in revenue but an overall loss of $3.85 billion. Overall, however, Meta remains profitable: with net income of $12.4 billion over the same period, a year-over-year increase of 117 percent.
“Historically, investing in building these new scaled experiences in our apps has been a very good long-term investment for us and for the investors who have stayed with us,” said Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg. “And the initial signs are pretty positive here, too. But building leading AI will also be a bigger task than the other experiences we've added to our apps, and this will likely take several years.”
So what's next at Meta and what could be the product that finally brings augmented reality to the mainstream? Projected images of your surroundings are coming to the Quest 3 headset later this year, but the biggest improvements for the headset appear to be further away.
This week, a Android Center An interview with Meta's Caitlin Kalinowski suggested that the company's upcoming Project Nazarre glasses, which will allow virtual objects to be convincingly superimposed on their real-world environment with a high field of view, were still several years away. Meta hopes this will be the company's 'iPhone moment', when the product hits the mainstream and suddenly everyone in the world wants one of their own.
And in the meantime, Meta will continue spending money to get there.
