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Meta continues to draw criticism for how it engages with younger consumers using its platforms, but the company is also planning new products that meet their needs. Monday company Announce Later this year, Quest will launch a new educational product to position its virtual reality headset as a teaching device in classrooms.
The product hasn’t been named yet, but in a blog post describing it, Nick Clegg, the company’s head of global affairs — a former politician who became Meta’s CEO likely to deliver messages on more controversial and divisive topics — said that it will include a hub for education-specific apps and features, as well as To the ability to manage multiple headphones simultaneously without having to update each device individually.
Business models for devices and services are also yet to be clarified. With nothing on the table, the company is framing it as a long-term bet.
“We accept that it will take a long time, and we won’t make any money from this anytime soon,” Clegg said in an interview with the magazine. Axios.
On the plus side, the push toward education could mean more diverse content for Quest users, along with a broader ecosystem of developers building out the platform — not the killer app that app 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 less positive developments at the company. Meta instant messaging service WhatsApp It has come under a lot of controversy due to the fact that it lowers 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 ages so they can provide tweens and teens with appropriate experiences.
The new initiative will be rolled out later this year and will only be available to institutions with students aged 13 and over. Meta said it will launch first in 20 markets where it already supports Quest for Business, Meta’s $14.99-a-month workplace-focused subscription. This list includes the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and several other English-speaking markets, along with Japan and most Western European countries.
There are a number of companies already in the market exploring the idea of virtual reality in classrooms, with names like ImmersionVR, ClassVR and ArborVR, not to mention the likes of Microsoft, which have been pushing their products forward. HoloLens As an educational tool for a while now.
It’s not clear how widespread VR use is in schools: one provider, ClassVR, claims 40,000 classrooms worldwide use its products.
But despite this, there are still obstacles to the comprehensive use of the market. It is not clear, for example, whether attaching a headset to someone’s face is necessarily an aid in a live learning environment, given some of the research on Young people are already getting it Lots of screen time As is.
Another big question mark is the cost of buying the headphones — the Quest 3, the latest headphones, start at about $500 apiece for the base models — buying the apps and then supporting all that infrastructure later. Meta said he had already done so Donated The headphones have been sent to 15 universities in the US, but it’s not clear how far they will go to support long-term growth.
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