New York: In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta and proclaimed the metaverse — a digital environment where people would work, socialise and spend much of their daily lives — as the company’s next great frontier. He hailed it as the “successor to the mobile internet” and vowed that Meta would become “metaverse-first.”

Yet the metaverse has failed to offer consumers a compelling reason to abandon their phones or laptops. Despite years of investment, virtual reality is still hampered by fundamental technical constraints, and outside a niche gaming audience, there is little content that attracts sustained mainstream interest.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg had poured vast sums into his virtual reality endeavour. Four years on, Reality Labs, the division responsible for VR head

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