Meta Is Planning To Open Retail Stores to Sell VR Headsets, AR
Glasses, Portable Devices, And More.
Facebook is now known as Meta give people the power to build community and
bring the work closer together virtually, how crazy is that! The metaverse is the
next evolution of social connection. Metas’ vision is to help bring the metaverse
to life, so they are changing their name to reflect their commitment to this
future. Meta is developing exciting new technologies that will help people
connect and explore in the metaverse. Meta is going up a notch and is planning
to open retail stores as a means to better showcase its next-level hardware
designs, they are wanting to sell virtual reality headsets, augmented reality
glasses, portable devices and much more.
The stores would be used to introduce people to devices made by the company’s
Reality Labs division, such as virtual reality headsets and eventually augmented
reality glasses as mentioned by Meta. The report’s sources say the project is still
in development but isn’t guaranteed to proceed. If it does go ahead, the stores
could “eventually span the world”.
The reason for opening these physical stores is to guide users towards Meta’s
vision of the metaverse, an immersive digital world of endless possibilities. Meta
will need to get more of these tools and devices into more homes and physical
stores which could be a better way to establish direct-to-consumer supply
chains, while also enabling new showcase opportunities to generate more sales.
Virtual, mixed, and augmented reality are technologies that need to be tried to
be truly understood by individuals. Factors like head shape, eyesight, and
sensitivity to weight against sinuses can affect how comfortable a given person
finds a head-mounted device. Headsets and glasses could be ideal for a physical
retail strategy.
Meta is already seeing strong consumer demand for its standalone VR units and
has plans for more advanced versions of this device, while it now also has its
Portal video calling device, which has also seen a jump in sales in the middle of
the pandemic, and its Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses collaboration.
Based on reports, Meta is working on a new smartwatch and could also be
looking to develop new beacons for retail stores, to provide more direct sales
insight to counter data losses because of Apple’s ATT update.
Meta could also look to include full body scan booths within these stores to
better connect people into virtual space. People will engage with this as people
are enjoying the innovative changes in technology. Meta is developing new
scanning technology that would facilitate more accurate representations of
people in AR and VR, people won’t be able to conduct full-body scans at a high
level of accuracy using their mobile devices. You’ll need a dedicated studio to
facilitate such and maybe this could be a possibility for Meta to implement this in
their retail stores.
Soon, you could see a Meta store coming to your local mall, which would make
connecting into the metaverse is as easy as buying a headset at a store and
logging on.
