Meta to open physical Meta Store with aim of ‘demystifying’ the metaverse
Meta has announced that it will be opening the Meta Store – a physical location where visitors can interact with the company’s products – on its Burlingame, California campus on May 9. The news marks the latest push from the tech giant to promote mainstream interest in the metaverse, of which it has tried to position itself as the leading architect.
Meta announces plans to open its first physical store / Adobe Stock
In a blog post published today, Meta announced that its upcoming retail space will be devoted to providing “a hands-on experience” with the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, Ray-Ban Stories (the company’s “first generation of smart glasses”) and Portal (a “smart video-calling” device). The store will be approximately 1,550 square feet and will be located close to Meta’s Reality Labs headquarters, where the company says it is “helping [to] build the metaverse.”
“At the Meta Store, we want you to interact with everything,” the company said in the blog post. “We want you to pick stuff up. We want you to feel it.”
Facebook changed its name to Meta last year in an effort to emphasize its new commitment to building the metaverse – a notoriously slippery concept, which the company’s founder and chief executive recently described to podcaster Lex Fridman as being less of a “place” than “a time when basically immersive digital worlds become the primary way that we live our lives and spend our time.”
Meta says that its primary goal with its new store is to give visitors a taste of their latest tech while simultaneously “demystifying” the metaverse. “The Meta Store is going to help people make that connection to how our products can be the gateway to the metaverse in the future,” Martin Gilliard, head of Meta Store, said in the blog post. “We’re not selling the metaverse in our store, but hopefully people will come in and walk out knowing a little bit more about how our products will help connect them to it.”
The Meta Store will sell Quest 2 headsets, Quest 2 accessories and Portal video-calling devices. Ray-Ban Stories will be available only for demo and can be purchased at ray-ban.com.
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