Meta's metaverse chief sees explosive growth of metaverse in two years

Vishal Shah

Metaverse will become explosive that can change the way global audience communicate on the social media when it reaches the “magic number” of 10 million user threshold in 2023, according to Vishal Shah, the head of metaverse projects at Meta (formerly Facebook).

“Any new hardware platform requires some amount of scale to get proper investment from the content ecosystem,” and “the magic number is roughly around 10 million units,” said Shah, former head of product for Instagram who has been leading metaverse projects at Meta since August, in an exclusive interview with Maeil Business Newspaper last Friday.

Facebook has changed its name to Meta to emphasize its CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s ambition to build a broad metaverse where people can get together virtually to work, game and communicate using virtual reality (VR) headsets.

Market data provider Statista forecast that the unit sales of VR headset would exceed 10 million per year by 2023. Meta has a broad ambition as it wants to see a billion people use the metaverse, supporting millions of developers and creators creating hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce, according to Shah.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. [Source: Facebook]

He also emphasized that the metaverse is not something that Meta can build alone. He said the company will have to work with other companies and platforms to build a place where multiple people can come together across devices.

Global tech giants are increasingly embracing open source technology and cross-company cooperation. Microsoft CEO Satay Nadella has decided to open up its Windows operating system. Meta will also lift its restriction that requires users of its VR headset Oculus Quest to log in with Facebook account. Shah said they would have to cooperate with other companies to build a set of “interoperable standards” can be applied across devices.

Meta will spend about $1 billion in 2021 and continue to make a “considerable investment” for a long term. He said the company is committed to make a bold investment for the metaverse like it did with Oculus over the past seven years since it acquired the company in 2014.

He sees the Korean market is very important as there are many early adopters of new products and technologies. In Korea, there are cultures and markets that crave what’s next, he said, and the country that has been on the cutting edge is expected to contribute to creating “new norms” for new virtual environment and be in a “leading position,” like the first generation of professional gamers came from Korea.

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