Meta continues to receive criticism over how it handles younger consumers using its platforms, but the company is also planning new products that cater to them. On Monday, the company Announced which will launch a new educational product for Quest later this year to position its VR headset as a go-to device for classroom teaching.
The product doesn’t have a name yet, but in a blog post describing it, Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, the former politician who has become the Meta executive most likely to deliver messages on more controversial topics and divisive, he said It will include a hub for education-specific apps and features, as well as the ability to manage multiple headsets at once without having to update each device individually.
Business models for hardware and services are also yet to be defined. With nothing on the table, the company presents it as a long-term bet.
“We accept that it is going to take a long time and that we are not going to make money from this in the short term,” Clegg said in an interview with axios.
On the plus side, a push into education could mean more diversified content for Quest users, along with a broader ecosystem of developers creating for the platform; not the killer app that critics say is still missing from VR, but at least more action.
On more problematic ground, the news comes on the heels of some other developments at the company that are less positive. Meta’s instant messaging service. WhatsApp It has generated a lot of controversy due to the fact that it is lowering the minimum age for users to 13 in the UK and EU (previously it was 16).
Monday’s announcement comes on the heels of Meta asking Quest users to confirm their age so it can provide teens and tweens with appropriate experiences.
The new initiative will roll out later this year and will only be available to institutions with students ages 13 and up. Meta said it will launch first in the 20 markets where it already supports Quest for Business, Meta’s $14.99 a month workplace-focused subscription. That list includes the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and several other English-speaking markets, along with Japan and much of Western Europe.
There are already several companies on the market exploring the idea of virtual reality in the classroom, with names like ImmersionVR, ClassVR and ArborVR, not to mention companies like Microsoft, which has been pushing its HoloLens as an educational tool for some time.
It’s unclear how ubiquitous the use of virtual reality is in schools: one vendor, ClassVR, claims that 40,000 classrooms worldwide are using its products.
But still, there are still obstacles to mass-market use. It is not clear, for example, whether placing headphones on someone’s face is necessarily helpful in a live educational environment, considering some of the research on young people are already receiving too much screen time how are the things going.
And another big question mark will be related to the cost of buying headsets (the Quest 3, the latest headset, costs about $500 each for basic models), purchasing apps, and then supporting all that infrastructure. Meta said that already donated Quest ships headsets to 15 U.S. universities, but it’s unclear how far it will go to subsidize long-term growth.
