Meta's new commercial shows futuristic Metaverse vision
Meta shows how VR and AR can transcend physical and social boundaries in a new Metaverse commercial.
The commercial is available in a short and a long version. The story is the same and follows three East African cyclists who want to participate in the Tour de France. They use social media to socialize and become known, and race on peloton-like devices.
Then the spot takes a look into the future. You see futuristic VR and AR headsets demonstrating the superpowers of these technologies: Teleportation and Augmentation. Users meet patrons in the Metaverse and train more efficiently through devices that incorporate and digitally augment the racing terrain.
Metaverse-Ideals
Meta picks up the audience with a familiar story (disadvantaged people manage to break out of their environment through hard work and talent) and then shows how virtual reality and augmented reality could one day help accelerate this positive development. The vision is that of a geography-less metaverse where people can meet at eye level without their origins or physical location mattering.
The commercial shows a more distant future: VR and AR headsets are technologically mature and also widely available and relatively affordable - just like the smartphone is today. In a conversation with Joe Rogan, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that the first real AR headsets would be very expensive and would only cost a few hundred US dollars in a more distant future - assuming, of course, that they reach the mainstream.
Meta communicates more realistically
This is Meta's third programmatic Metaverse commercial since its rebranding nearly a year ago. The first, playful clip (watch below) showed how technology could transform the art experience, while the second revealed the potential for education and medicine.
The latter's advertising message is that the Metaverse may be virtual, but it has real-world implications. The third commercial takes the same tack, showing VR and AR as catalysts of positive social change.
From a technological perspective, this vision is not pure science fiction: Meta presents concepts for a compact visor and sports glasses equipped with AR technology. Both could exist in similar form before the end of this decade. It's also a far cry from the colorful Ready Player One-style Metaverse presentation Meta showed when it announced its name change from Facebook to Meta.
Super-slim AR headsets that can embed visually sophisticated 3D holograms into reality are not part of the video. Presumably because, technologically speaking, they are even further away.
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