Mark Zuckerberg Says More Functional Metaverse Still a Few Years Away

• The Facebook founder and CEO spoke about a timeline for a functional metaverse, the company’s new focus.
• There are several challenges to overcome in hardware, AI and useability. 
• “My experience is the future tends to come sooner than you think when you bet on it,” Zuckerberg said.

Mark Zuckerberg is still not quite sure when Facebook will have a functional metaverse.

“We’re a few years off,” he said during this year’s South by Southwest Festival in Texas, speaking about Facebook’s timeline for a 3D version of its services accessible through AR and VR devices and tech. “You’ll get some experiences, some things like what we did with Ray-Ban where we cram as much tech as possible into a normal looking pair of glasses. But we’re a few years away from the first thing that really does AR and looks like what you would call glasses.”

Even at that point, Zuckerberg said it “won’t be perfect.” In the meantime, there will be new products rolling out, like new iterations of the Quest (formerly Oculus) headset, which he compared to the first iPhone in terms of impact in VR. “It’s an important discipline to ship things every couple of years,” he added.

The CEO has previously said it will likely be a decade before Facebook, aka Meta Platforms, will more fully realize its metaverse ambitions. The Reality Labs segment of the company working on metaverse projects last year lost $10 billion and there are plenty of other hurdles to overcome.

“In order for VR to take off it’s going to have to look good,” Zuckerberg said during SXSW. “It’s one of the most interesting challenges of the next decade. Miniaturizing things is much harder.”

He also made his first public comments on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “massively destabilizing” event. 

As for why he decided to change the name of the company, Zuckerberg admitted it was to some extent about “external communications,” or telling the outside world his company has a new focus beyond its widely-used and highly profitable social media services. It was also about talking to his employees.

“The external comms you do is to rally people inside the company,” he said. “It means more than saying at a meeting, ‘Ok, I’m going to put some resources on this team to go build this thing.’”

More than that, the rebrand was about staking a claim on what Zuckerberg sees as “the next chapter” of the internet. 

“A lot of what the Meta vision is is about planting a flag and thrusting what we do into the future,” he said. “My experience is the future tends to come sooner than you think when you bet on it.”

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