What’s the state of the metaverse? Well, not as well as Meta would have hoped, according to one major analyst’s sales forecast for the Quest 3 mixed reality headgear. This, along with the fact that Meta continues to fire employees from its Reality Labs section, which is in charge of producing the company’s valued VR goods, indicates a slowing in the race to leave meatspace behind.
Meta had just finished hyping up its newest VR gear at its Meta Connect presentation last week. The $500 gadget is designed to merge full-color altered reality and virtual reality in one device, but Meta may not experience the same level of demand as the Quest 2 did when it originally debuted. TF Shipping predictions for the Quest 3 in the second half of 2023 were originally estimated at more over 7 million units early this year, according to International Securities industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. That figure has been reduced to 2 to 2.5 million units for the second half of 2023, and he expects the business to ship only 1 million devices next year.
The recently featured Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses aren’t faring any better. According to Kuo’s projections, Meta will only ship roughly 1.5 million units throughout the course of the product’s existence. The original Ray-Ban Stories, released by Meta in 2021, had only approximately 50,000 active users, despite the firm expecting to deploy roughly 2 million pieces. Meta reduced that quantity to 300-400,000 glasses when sales fell short of expectations.
The Quest 3’s expected release date comes at a horrible moment for Meta. According to two unidentified sources, Reuters reported that Meta staged yet another round of layoffs, this time focusing on the people who design bespoke chips for the company’s VR technology. The Facebook Agile Silicon Team, which produces bespoke chips for Meta’s AR/VR services, is said to be among those affected by the layoffs. It’s unknown how many people were let go, but internal correspondence allegedly indicated that members were being reviewed on Tuesday and were expected to be told if they were safe by Wednesday.
According to reports, the business has struggled to develop its own processors more powerful than specialist chipmakers such as Qualcomm. According to The Information, despite efforts to develop a semiconductor for the new Ray-Ban spectacles, the business chose Qualcomm instead. The Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen1 processor is included in the new eyewear. The Quest 3 will be powered by a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor.
Last year’s Meta Quest Pro similarly failed to match the company’s sales targets, and the $1,500 headgear was reduced to $999 just a few months after its debut. Meta expects to compete directly with Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro, so it attempted to pitch its latest VR experience as having some of the same capabilities as Apple’s ultra-expensive device, with hand tracking and full-color passthrough for a tenth of the price.
To be fair, Kuo has made equally pessimistic projections for Apple’s Vision Pro headset, claiming that the company will only be able to sell 400,000 to 500,000 devices next year. He also stated that the Vision Pro sequel will not be released until 2027. He’s not optimistic about headsets since customers need to be convinced of why they need one in the first place, claiming that “the Vision Pro may take longer than the market expects to become the next star product of the iPhone.”
According to Counterpoint analysis, the Quest 2 has retained the majority of the VR market share during its existence. Still, overall VR headset shipments had dropped by half by the second quarter of this year, and the debut of the PlayStation VR2 was the only thing that kept things from becoming worse.
