The report quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that Meta provides programmers who can create VR-related technologies with annual salaries ranging from 600,000 to nearly 1 million US dollars. Patrick McAdams, chief executive of Andiamo, said the company’s compensation levels are “significantly higher” than most other game companies, “it is no exaggeration to say that their total compensation is twice or more than that of large game companies.”

It is reported that Meta spent about US$10 billion on the construction of the metaverse in 2021, and invested another US$15.9 billion in its Reality Labs department last year. This metaverse-focused business has lost about US$19 billion in the past two years.

Meta is willing to pay “exceptionally high salaries,” apparently in order to get the best developers to work for them rather than for their competitors. A former recruiter who worked for Meta told The Washington Post that they usually don’t encounter much competition because they pay “well above market rates” across multiple positions.

The report also said that over the past nine months, the average compensation for all VR developers hired by Meta was nearly $540,000. By comparison, Apple’s top compensation package for VR developers is under $500,000, and Google pays its top developers around $440,000.

Meta is trying to beat the competition by hiring the best talent, but the competition is still heating up. Sony Group released the PlayStation VR2 in February, and Apple dropped a blockbuster on the market with its high-priced Apple Vision Pro.

An executive at a smaller game company said he failed to hire a senior developer last year because Meta offered the developer an annual salary of $800,000, with the possibility of boosting the total compensation to $1 million through performance bonuses. $ or so, and the developer doesn’t have very unique experience and skills.

Data show that Meta shares have risen more than 130% this year.

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Meta is reviving public interest in the Metaverse by using Metaverse technology as a tool to help train employees. This shows that even now that artificial intelligence is in the spotlight, Meta has not given up on its vision for the metaverse.

Speaking at the Future of Work Summit in Washington on Tuesday, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said augmented reality and virtual reality could play a “transformative” role in pre-job training and vocational education.

“I’m convinced that when it comes to augmented reality and virtual reality, one of the most powerful applications is the ability to dramatically increase the level of learning new skills,” Nick Clegg said, referring to Metaverse technology’s role in the skills industry, Applications in schools and elderly care.

Despite fading enthusiasm for the Metaverse and recent layoffs at Reality Lab, Meta’s Metaverse business unit that makes the Quest headset and Horizon Worlds virtual reality platform, Nick Clegg’s rhetoric remains optimistic. “It will take about 10 to 15 years before the technology is mature enough to be affordable enough for users to become truly pervasive in society,” Clegg said.

Interplay Learning CEO Doug Donavon uses Meta’s virtual reality headsets to train workers in industries such as plumbing, HVAC systems, and electrical services. The technology has helped the company develop a “boot camp-style” training that gets people ready for work in five to six weeks, rather than the months it previously took, he said. While more and more employers in related industries are committing to using virtual reality technology, there are still many obstacles to adopting this technology in practice. “People haven’t fully bought in,” Donovan said at the event. “It’s been a hand-to-hand battle to convince them that this technology has potential.”

At present, the generative artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT is popular all over the Internet. The latest advances in the field of artificial intelligence have attracted the interest of the technology community and spawned new startups. Nick Clegg said the ever-changing hype cycle helps the company achieve its goals in the Metaverse realm, not replace them. “We can do both. It’s not a trade-off,” Nick Clegg said. “The two are completely complementary. Without generative AI, people can’t enjoy the fun of the future metaverse.” As an example, he said, The time to build a virtual world can be shortened with simple verbal prompts. The surge in artificial intelligence has also reignited fears that people’s jobs could be displaced. For Meta, those concerns are also opportunities, Nick Clegg said, for the company to position Metaverse technology as a way to put more people in jobs, not replace them.

This selling point has won the support of some members of the US Congress. Last week, Democratic Representatives Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Republican Representative Tim Walberg of Michigan introduced a bill called the Immersive Technology for the American Workforce Act, a bipartisan bill to create a five-year grant program at the U.S. Department of Labor to support community schools and vocational education centers in the classroom Deploy augmented and virtual reality technologies.

Beyond job losses, AI raises ethical, legal and safety concerns. Even OpenAI founder Sam Altman called on U.S. senators on Tuesday for stricter regulation of AI technology, warning that AI is powerful enough to change the entire world in unpredictable ways. society.

Nick Clegg said Meta has had “multiple conversations” about how to regulate the Metaverse, and welcomes the establishment of a regulatory framework. “I think one of the things we’ve all learned over the last 15 years is that it’s not good to have a technology explosion and then have retroactive legislation,” Nick Clegg said, adding that artificial Intelligence is clearly more urgent for regulators at the moment. “The good thing about augmented reality and virtual reality is that we have time. We don’t need to rush to do this.”

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According to the Deloitte report, economic gains could come from the use of these technologies in defense, medical and manufacturing, as well as entertainment use cases such as video games and communications. The Metaverse concept includes augmented reality and virtual reality technologies that allow users to immerse themselves in virtual worlds, or overlay digital information on images of the real world.

In 2021, Meta focuses the company on building the Metaverse technology, which it predicts will eventually replace mobile devices as the primary computing platform. However, investors have questioned Meta’s huge investment in the Metaverse project. Investors were skeptical about the project’s return at a time when an advertising downturn weighed on Meta’s revenue growth.

In a separate report, Meta said the EU could boost economic opportunity by up to 489 billion euros ($538.3 billion) a year to 2035, or about 1.3%-2.4% of its total GDP.

Deloitte says the Metaverse will contribute between C$45.3 billion ($33.88 billion) and C$85.5 billion to Canada’s annual GDP by 2035.

Last year, Meta commissioned consulting firm Analysis Group to publish a report on the global economic impact. The report estimates that the popularity of the Metaverse will contribute $3.01 trillion to the global economy by 2031.

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The metaverse Clegg logged into was Meta’s Horizon Workrooms, and he himself logged in from London, while many journalists logged in from Washington using borrowed Meta Quest headsets. However, the avatars of this group of reporters in the metaverse only have the upper body, and only Craig’s avatar closely resembles himself.

While the Metaverse app experience today isn’t smooth enough, he promises that it will eventually be replaced by a more convenient experience that not only uses a lightweight device but also has legs for an avatar.

“We’re going to stick with this technology because we really think the early evidence points to this type of technology being at the heart of future computing platforms,” Clegg said. “But it’s going to take time.”

Clegg’s commitment to the Metaverse stands in stark contrast to the attitudes of other tech companies. The tech industry’s enthusiasm for the development of the Metaverse has shifted to the field of artificial intelligence, and the startup community has also focused on artificial intelligence. Some companies have scaled back spending on virtual experiences as tighter economic conditions have forced the tech industry to pool resources.

In February of this year, Microsoft canceled the Industrial Metaverse project in a mass layoff of 10,000 people. Microsoft has long been an ally of Meta, with CEO Satya Nadella appearing at the social media giant’s product event, announcing that it will co-develop virtual reality technology, as well as Microsoft’s productivity technology. Tools Teams, Word and Excel. Just this week, Disney also cut a department working on metaverse strategy in a major layoff.

Clegg said Wednesday that there are two main ways Meta can monetize its Metaverse investment: advertising and e-commerce. In fact, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are making huge profits by using user data to send targeted ads to them, but how much time people are willing to invest in virtual goods, or whether they are willing to use VR tools for shopping, is still unclear. Know.

Meta has a delicate relationship with investors when it comes to its commitment to the Metaverse. Meta was originally named Facebook, and it was in order to vigorously develop the metaverse that the company was renamed Meta. In 2022, when facing three consecutive quarters of declining revenue, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) insisted on investing heavily in the Metaverse. But investors chose to vote with their feet, sending the stock on track for its worst year ever.

Zuckerberg changed his attitude completely in February, declaring that 2023 is the “Year of Efficiency” and will focus on solving short-term problems. As a result, on the basis of layoffs of 11,000 last year, Meta laid off another 10,000 employees. The layoffs affect all teams, including the Reality Labs division that works on the Metaverse. Boosted by this, Facebook’s stock price rose rapidly instead, hitting a new one-year high.

The gaming and fitness industries have been quicker to embrace the Metaverse, but Clegg sees great potential in the education and healthcare industries as well. He also emphasized that the company is committed to involving researchers, civic organizations, and other companies in the development of the Metaverse to create an experience of “true creativity, real ingenuity, and real joy, so that we can all enjoy happy development.” .

In the virtual room on Wednesday, when a reporter asked a question, all three avatars on the screen moved their mouths, because in the physical room in Washington, three different headsets all detected the same voice. The scenery outside the virtual room is very beautiful, creating a beautiful scenery of green water and green mountains. Although in a virtual world, reporters still use physical notebooks to record on the spot, but when they try to peek at the physical notebook in front of them through the gap under the headset, a virtual arm flashes from the avatar.

“What I want to emphasize is that someday, when we look back at today’s headsets, it’s going to be like, ‘Oh my god, do you remember when we had the Quest Pro?'” Clegg said. “We have always been very clear that freezing three feet does not happen in a day.”

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Recently, Liu Wei, the founder and president of MiHoYo, even talked about his grand vision in an interview, aiming to create a metaverse virtual world with 1 billion people by 2030.

In an interview with The Paper, Liu Wei said that his vision is to create a virtual world in which 1 billion people are willing to live in by 2030. He hopes to start from the content field and eventually allow one billion users to enjoy the virtual world in the Metaverse. In the next ten years, there is an opportunity to make products with world influence in this field.

In addition, Liu Wei revealed that the company has a high proportion of international business, accounting for nearly 50%, and will continue to make efforts on the road of internationalization in the future.

Cai Haoyu, co-founder and CEO of HoYoverse, also said before: “The mission of establishing HoYoverse is to create a grand virtual world driven by content, where games, animation and other entertainment types are integrated to provide players with a high degree of freedom and immersion. “

Cai Haoyu also pointed out: “We will continue to focus on long-term operation strategies, continue to carry out technical research, and continue to innovate in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and industrialized capacity building to ensure that we create enough content to meet global players’ expectations for virtual world experience. .”

The HoYoverse will expand its work in content production, technical research and distribution functions through operations in offices in Montreal, Los Angeles, Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul.

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The event, which took place last week, was essentially a relaxed “beach party” within the metaverse, with music and various entertainment, and the theme of the event was to launch and promote the EU’s “Global Gateway” strategy. Gateway.)

The event, held in virtual reality, was an expensive one, and when it was first announced in October, it raised questions among EU employees.

Some of the earliest comments from EU employees about the €387,000 event included “disappointing, embarrassing” and even “digital garbage.

The EU body said the campaign was chosen to be held within the meta-universe to target young people between the ages of 18 and 35, a group keen on social media tools (such as short-form video platform TikTok and mobile platform Instagram) and traditionally less enthusiastic about participating in political campaigns.

What amounted to an online video campaign turned out to be a virtual reality event, but now it seems that the EU did not achieve its goal of sending a message to the young population.

The European Union’s International Partnership, which organized the event, introduced it on social media by welcoming everyone to the Global Gateway strategic platform, a shareable digital platform where people can make new friends, think about and discuss topical global issues, and make a difference to This is a shared digital platform where people can make new friends, think about and discuss topical global issues, and make a difference to the future we all share.

Chadwick, the aforementioned journalist who participated in the metaverse event, described his experience via social media, saying that only five people other than himself participated in the event.

Chadwick and the other participants were bored, they talked to each other and none of them knew exactly what the event was going to do.

Chadwick asked another participant if they were mistaken about the date of the event (because it was so cold). Another participant said that the so-called live concert was the same DJ playing the same song on a loop.

About an hour after the event started, everyone else had left the venue, leaving Chadwick alone.

The so-called “EU Global Gateway Strategy” reportedly aims to raise about 300 billion euros by 2027 to help the world gradually return to normal after the epidemic’s impact.

The EU has yet to comment on this embarrassing launch.

It should be noted that this EU campaign is not the “only embarrassment” for the metaverse concept. Several years ago, the American social media giant Meta and its head Mark Zuckerberg launched the metaverse concept around the world, but the implementation of the concept did not go well, and Meta’s metaverse division has accumulated a loss of $30.7 billion in funding, so Mark Zuckerberg announced massive layoffs at Meta. Against the backdrop of this harsh reality, the Meta Universe concept has been criticized and questioned in a new round around the world.

The latest quarterly earnings data shows that Zuckerberg is increasing the stakes on the metaverse concept, which is widely questioned, making investors “feel even more disgusted” with Zuckerberg’s metaverse plan.

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Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of software, were interviewed by reporter Joanna Stern at a WSJ Tech Live event on Tuesday. Stern asked the two executives about the company’s future headset and, not surprisingly, they didn’t say a word about it.

The reporter then asked the two executives to finish the sentence “The metaverse is …… ” to which Joswiak quickly replied: “…… A word I would never use.” Apple always avoids talking about future products, and this is no exception. However, Joswiak’s answer to a reporter about the metaverse sounded as if it was making fun of Facebook since the company specifically changed its name to promote what it calls the metaverse.

While Apple has yet to launch any virtual reality products, Meta has been actively investing in the category. Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook mocked Meta, saying that “ordinary people” don’t know what the metaverse is. He also mentioned that he didn’t think people should be encouraged to “spend their lives” in virtual worlds.

A few days later, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the metaverse should be an open platform and that Apple was likely to go the other way, which in his opinion could hurt competitors and consumers.

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In his candid opinion, the “work in the metaverse” idea of Meta is rather impractical, as it transforms what is to be a gaming platform into a boring meeting room. He went on to pinpoint the fact that video game developers are creative and can make amazing games in the metaverse. The idea of having a working environment in what is supposed to be a gaming world is simply poor creativity.

Read also: Meta Quest Pro VR headset launched, paving new ways to enter the Metaverse.

Other top players in the tech industry also had their ideas on Zuckerberg’s plan for the metaverse. One such individual is Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, who likened the metaverse to life inside a computer, which he is not willing to partake in. Some others see the metaverse as a complicating next-generation term which might expand in the coming decades.

So far, even Meta is yet to convince its prospective users of the practicality of the metaverse independent of gaming. Most VR gaming device manufacturers limit themselves to 3D immersive gaming, but Meta is thinking big, envisioning a future in the virtual world. Possibly, in the years ahead, Meta will be able to pull more users into the metaverse. Even the Xbox CEO believes that there is a future for the metaverse, but not the way Meta envisions it presently. 

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