Social Media business goes VR
According to a recent UploadVR article, almost 20% of Facebook employees (around 10 thousand people) work exclusively on VR/AR/XR technologies now. The authors point out that Facebook’s Oculus division responsible for VR significantly increased the company’s non-advertising revenue from $346 in 2019 up to $885 million in the last three months of 2020. FB CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees VR as the next computing platform. That goes in line with the long-term FB strategy to ensure VR headsets full market penetration through affordable hardware. That figure corroborates the former observations that American tech-giants make serious moves in the convergent media space of Immersive Technologies. Strong investments made by Facebook that consolidated its research under Facebook Reality Labs, Microsoft and Apple indicate that an important part of the next-gen social media and serious communication business will include VR & AR technologies.
At this point, it is still hard to see serious Immersive Technologies competition on the European side, while American tech-giants secure their strong position in the new emerging market that is considered to dominate the next decade. EU must ensure that relevant continuous investments are made to creating relevant ecosystems and support European Immersive Technologies businesses to establish a strong presence in EU and global markets. More collaboration should be encouraged between the platforms and the ecosystems.
Find the full source article: HERE
Read our related Immersive Technologies Symposium report: HERE
