Meta Strategy

News from Meta with a strong strategy:

Meta Expands Horizon Worlds Access to VR Users in the UK

Meta launched Horizon Worlds with all?users in the US and Canada in December, and it’s now expanding that to the UK, before opening up access to all EU users in the coming months.

Meta adds voice controls for Horizon Worlds, which defaults to live chat with strangers

Now the company is adding?Voice Mode, a new set of controls for voice chat that will be rolling out in the coming weeks. Voice chat is inexplicably still enabled by default but will soon come with some more granular options that let users opt in to disable audio from nearby strangers. There’s also a new option to “garble” strangers’ voices, turning them into “unintelligible, friendly sounds”?

Meta to enable social interactions in Horizon Worlds via Quest 2

Meta, announced on Friday, June 10 that it is adding the ability for users to socialize in its metaverse, dubbed Horizon Worlds, through an update to its virtual reality headset, the Oculus Quest 2. This update will seemingly allow users to interact with each other, thereby getting a closer feel of the ‘metaverse’ experience that Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg — and almost everyone else in the technology industry, have been talking about.

Meta’s Horizon Worlds Is Testing In-App Purchases and Creator Bonuses

Horizon Worlds, Meta’s social virtual reality program, is experimenting with a feature that will allow artists to sell virtual things and effects in their worlds. This is only available to a select set of artists at the moment, but it’s an essential step forward in Meta’s long-term strategy of laying the groundwork for virtual reality social networking. “Clearly, the ability to sell virtual things and to be able to carry them with you from one world to another is going to be an essential element of it,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with Vidyuu Studios, where he introduced the feature.

“However, in order to get that economy moving, there must first be items that people desire to buy.” These in-world purchases will be available to all Horizon Worlds users who are above the age of 18 in the United States and Canada. To begin with, these goods may be fashion items or access to hidden areas of the globe.

Meta Partners with NBA for Virtual Reality Fan Engagement Games, Activities

he NBA and Meta have partnered to make?NBA Lane, the league’s fictional neighborhood?used in promotional content this season and?an interactive destination in Horizon Worlds.

Horizon Worlds is the virtual-reality-based?metaverse?developed by the company formerly known as Facebook.?NBA Lane?is hosting several games and activities for visitors, including a free-throw shooting contest, low-gravity dunk contest,?a chance to take selfies with a virtual Larry O’Brien Trophy and a place for?communal viewing of NBA content on a big screen.?

This activation?is?available?to users in the U.S. and Canada?through June 30.?The NBA and Meta have?collaborated on prior VR?projects, including making some League Pass games available?to Quest users through?Horizon Venues. Meta announced?last week?that?Horizon Venues would soon be folded into Horizon Worlds and subsequently retired as a standalone platform.?

Meta tease Questy’s, an arcade restaurant that will open in Horizon Worlds

Lasting 60 seconds, the TV spot will focus on a group of friends who are in different places, and therefore separated by distance. They reconnect using their Meta Quest 2 VR headset and Horizon Worlds, Meta’s metaverse. Looking closely at the commercial, we can see that the subjects presented are not people, but rather animatronics. Chances are it will end with these famous characters reuniting at VR arcade restaurant Questy’s. Anyway, new information will of course be revealed during the Super Bowl.

Oculus Quest 2 leak suggests body tracking support is coming

The Oculus Quest 2 is one of the most popular VR headsets, but when it comes to motion tracking, it’s currently limited to hand and head movements.

The leak comes after Meta made changes to Unity dev resources for Quest 2 and included a screenshot showing the Oculus SDK containing a drop-down menu for “Body Tracking Support”.

Meta, of course, quickly deleted the image, but not before eagle-eyed VR fans took a screenshot.

We think it would be particularly difficult to implement body tracking on the current Quest 2 headset, due to the placement of the cameras.

Although the Quest 2 has two downward-facing cameras, their placement means they can only really see the user’s body when seated and looking slightly downward.

We’re more likely to see this feature on the next Quest Pro or Project Cambria headsets, perhaps even a standalone device similar to the Vive Tracker 3.0.

Meta Accelerates Metaverse Strategy with the Launch of Crayta on Facebook Gaming

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has launched game developer platform Crayta on Facebook Gaming to allow users to create and share gaming experiences with friends.

Crayta provides users with an easy-to-use developer kit allowing them to create games on both mobile and desktop platforms.?

Commenting on the importance of integrating the platform with Facebook Gaming, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg?said: “Historically if you wanted to have something like this run in this high quality of a 3D environment, that would be really hard to render in a browser or on phones, but being able to do it with cloud infrastructure and then send it down across the network after having already rendered it in the cloud is a pretty big advance.”

This allows users of Facebook Gaming’s cloud streaming service to play the game without downloading it to their computer.

Meta’s social VR platform Horizon hits 300,000 users

Horizon Worlds was?rolled out to all Quest users in the US and Canada?in early December, its monthly user base has grown by a factor of 10x to 300,000 people,

Meta adds 'personal boundaries' to Horizon Worlds and Venues to fight harassment

Meta?is?rolling out?a feature called Personal Boundary in its?Horizon Worlds?and Horizon Venues virtual reality spaces to combat harassment. Each?avatar?will have a bubble with a radius of two virtual feet, so they won't be able to come within around four feet of each other.

Meta to launch 'metaverse academy' in France

Facebook's parent company Meta and a French digital training firm will launch a "metaverse academy" in France for the new academic year, the two organisations have said.

The school's goal in its first year will be to train for free around 100 students in two roles, specialist immersive technology developers and support and assistance technicians, Meta's vice president for southern Europe Laurent Solly said on Sunday.

Seen as the internet's next great technological development, the metaverse refers to an immersive digital world that aims to recreate real life via augmented or virtual reality and take the web from 2D to 3D.

The teaching method will be in-person and revolve around projects, with a focus on the 3D world and interactions in the virtual universes, said Frederic Bardeau, co-founder and boss of Simplon, the French firm working with Meta.

Meta’s new professional mode for content creators allows up to $35K in earnings

Meta?has faced stiff competition from TikTok and Twitter, the latter of which recently released a new policy for?Super Follows?to help increase creator revenue. Now, the social media giant formerly known as Facebook has introduced a “professional mode” for eligible creators, allowing them to earn revenue without creating a separate page on their platform.?

The announcement was recently made on?Meta’s for Creators blog. One of the monetization options available will be the?Reels Play Bonuses program, which permits creators to earn up to a not insignificant $35,000 based on the number of views of their qualifying reels.

Meta Selects AWS as Key, Long-Term Strategic Cloud Provider

Amazon Web Services, Inc.?(AWS), an?Amazon.com, Inc.?company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Meta (NASDAQ: FB) has deepened its relationship with AWS as a strategic cloud provider. Meta uses AWS’s proven infrastructure and comprehensive capabilities to complement its existing on-premises infrastructure, and will broaden its use of AWS compute, storage, databases, and security services to provide privacy, reliability, and scale in the cloud. Meta will run third-party collaborations in AWS and use the cloud to support acquisitions of companies that are already powered by AWS. It will also use AWS’s compute services to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) research and development for its Meta AI group. In addition, Meta and AWS will work together to improve the performance for customers running?PyTorch?on AWS and accelerate how developers build, train, deploy, and operate artificial intelligence/machine learning models.

Meta selects Azure as strategic cloud provider to advance AI innovation and deepen PyTorch collaboration

Microsoft is committed to the responsible advancement of AI to enable every person and organization to achieve more. Over the last few months, we have talked about advancements in our Azure infrastructure, Azure Cognitive Services, and Azure Machine Learning to make Azure better at supporting the AI needs of all our customers, regardless of their scale. Meanwhile, we also work closely with some of the leading research organizations around the world to empower them to build great AI.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce an expansion of our ongoing collaboration with Meta: Meta has selected Azure as a strategic cloud provider to help accelerate AI research and development.?

As part of this deeper relationship, Meta will expand its use of Azure’s supercomputing power to accelerate AI research and development for its Meta AI group. Meta will utilize a dedicated Azure cluster of 5400 GPUs using the latest virtual machine (VM) series in Azure (NDm A100 v4 series, featuring NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core 80GB GPUs) for some of their large-scale AI research workloads.?

Facebook Announces Zoom Partnership For Horizon Workrooms

Facebook?announced a collaboration with video conferencing application Zoom, integrating Zoom meetings natively into Facebook’s new remote work solution for VR,?Horizon Workrooms.

Meta and Teams Integration

Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, on Wednesday announced a partnership with Microsoft that will allow customers to integrate Meta's Workplace enterprise social network software with Microsoft Teams.

Going ahead, Metaverse will be a cumulation of work and play and everything in between. To ensure seamlessness, Meta is also testing Quest for Business– features designed for businesses to run on the Quest 2 headsets. Zuckerberg has plans to start its limited beta testing this year itself and further expand in 2002, launching it fully for businesses in 2023.?

Zuckerberg predicts that more than a billion people will reach the?Metaverse in the next decade, converting it into an entire ecosystem for interaction, working and creating content and products. Meta’s quest seems genuine; many critics are of the opinion that this is a distraction from Facebook’s controversial leaked documents. Meta’s AR glasses– Project Nazare continues to be a couple of years away, but the team is gearing up to jump-start the road ahead.?

Stay Tuned !!