David Bridges
Grimes, a popular Canadian musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is “under-qualified” to launch the metaverse. “If Zuck oversees the Metaverse it is dead and people who care about art and culture are building something else,” the singer tweeted, in response to Zuckerberg’s recent interview with Joe Rogan.
Grimes– who previously dated Elon Musk– is a vivid NFT collector, she has sold an NFT collection for nearly $6 million. The singer is known for her love of video games and sci-fi and fantasy culture. She also took a dig at Meta CEO’s recent avatar release. “This is bad. The quality of this image alone speaks to how wildly underqualified he is to build an alternate reality, literally every indie game looks better.”
This comes several days after Zuckerberg shared a screenshot of images from Horizon Worlds, the company’s metaverse. The screenshot showed a Zuckerberg avatar in front of the Eiffel Tower and Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia. The images were shared alongside an announcement that Horizon Worlds was launching in France and Spain.
According to The Verge, netizens on Twitter mocked the low-resolution graphics and called them “amateur”. Following which, Zuckerberg announced some new screenshots on Facebook and Instagram, the photos are more life-like versions of him and look pretty realistic. “I know the photo I posted earlier this week was pretty basic — it was taken very quickly to celebrate a launch. The graphics in Horizon are capable of much more — even on headsets — and Horizon is improving very quickly,” he wrote.
Meta changed its name from Facebook to Meta in October last year. Facebook’s attempt to rename itself was to align with its focus on building the metaverse, which CEO Zuckerberg sees as becoming a reality sooner or later. And Facebook, which also owns the Oculus VR gaming platform, doesn’t want to be left behind in the race to be a part of the metaverse. The rebranding followed the company’s 2014 acquisition of Oculus, a company that produces VR headsets with an emphasis on gaming, for $2 billion.
Meanwhile, the metaverse arm has missed on profits for the second quarter in a row. According to Reality Labs, Meta’s metaverse reported earnings of $452 million, a decrease from $695 million in the previous quarter. The division previously reported a $2.9 billion loss in the first quarter of 2022.
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Clara Hastings
