Five years ago, Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that the future of Facebook would be the metaverse. Based in virtual reality, it would be an immersive digital world where people could work, play and meet up, he said. To punctuate the point, Mr. Zuckerberg renamed his company Meta.
But in recent months, Meta laid off 10 percent of its employees in the division that works on the metaverse and said its flagship Horizon Worlds app, a digital universe where people socialize through their avatars, was turning its focus away from virtual reality.
This week, Meta delivered a near death blow. On Tuesday, the company said people would no longer be able to access the immersive world through virtual-reality headsets starting on June 15.
Then on Wednesday, Meta walked that back — but only to a point. It said that it would continue to support some existing V.R. apps in Horizon Worlds, but that it would not add new ones.
In other words, Mr. Zuckerberg’s original conception of the metaverse is effectively over.
Even after Meta lost roughly $80 billion on its endeavor, the metaverse and virtual reality remain niche interests among hobbyists and some businesses. Other digital worlds, like Roblox and Fortnite, became more popular.
Instead, Meta has gone all in on artificial intelligence. Last year, Mr. Zuckerberg proclaimed — again — a new future, this one centered on “superintelligence,” a form of godlike A.I. that can be the ultimate personal companion. His company has forecast spending at least $115 billion this year, primarily on A.I., including on the construction of vast data centers to power the technology.
Meta is not out of the metaverse. Horizon Worlds remains available on mobile phones. The company has a thriving business in augmented reality glasses that can record videos and let users talk with an A.I. assistant.
But in September, at the same developer conference where in 2021 he announced the renaming of his company, Mr. Zuckerberg used the term “metaverse” just twice, both in the final minutes of an hourlong presentation. He mentioned A.I. 23 times.
“They glommed onto the term ‘metaverse’ without really understanding the concept,” Wagner James Au, author of “Making a Metaverse That Matters,” said in an interview. “Their efforts on their metaverse strategy seemed completely indifferent to what previous platforms had learned.”
A Meta spokeswoman pointed to a February blog post that said the company “remains the biggest investor in the VR industry” and had “a robust roadmap of future VR headsets in the works.”
Mr. Zuckerberg’s pursuit of the metaverse began in 2014 when he paid $2 billion for Oculus, a start-up that made a cutting-edge V.R. headset that transported users to virtual worlds. He was charmed by the technology and believed it could eventually overtake the smartphone as a next-generation computing device.
Mr. Zuckerberg plowed billions into getting this idea off the ground. He bought gaming studios so people would have V.R. games to play, seeded the developer ecosystem with millions of dollars in funding and promoted the V.R. headsets.
But it was tough going. For a time, Facebook sold some of the headsets at a loss. In 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg admitted to investors that V.R. was “taking a bit longer” than he thought to pay off.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, the notion of interacting with friends and co-workers in virtual worlds rather than in person took on new possibilities. By 2021, Mr. Zuckerberg and his lieutenants were convinced that people would embrace this fantastical version of the future. They called it the metaverse, a term that was popularized by the science-fiction author Neal Stephenson and gaining traction among gaming and crypto enthusiasts.
That October, Mr. Zuckerberg declared that he was renaming his company Meta. The next few years, he argued, would usher in a mix of virtual and augmented reality experiences. Online and offline worlds would eventually fuse into one extended “meta” reality, or metaverse, he posited.
Part of that vision included gaming, but a major focus was also reimagining remote work. Instead of meeting over Zoom calls, people would interact as avatars in virtual offices, he said.
“Teleporting around the metaverse is going to be like clicking a link on the internet,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. He added: “Dropping our daily commutes will mean less time stuck in traffic and more time doing things that matter. And it’ll be good for the environment!”
Many took Mr. Zuckerberg’s word as gospel. Disney, Crate & Barrel and other companies were quick to appoint “chief metaverse officers” to explore what he said would be the next big thing in tech.
“With its potential to generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, the metaverse is too big for companies to ignore,” a 2022 McKinsey report said. It added that 15 percent of corporate revenue would be derived from the metaverse by 2027.
But Meta soon ran into digital roadblocks. Early versions of Horizon Worlds were buggy. People’s avatars, which were digital versions of themselves, were crude and incomplete; for a time, they were composed entirely of floating torsos. (Meta added leg functionality later, but not before being roundly mocked on social media.)
The biggest difficulty was that not enough people were on board with Mr. Zuckerberg’s vision. Virtual reality fitness games like Supernatural and Beat Saber never hit the critical mass needed to fully take off.
“They’re basically winding that whole experiment down, because they see that trying to will V.R. into existence as a stand-alone platform would take many more years and many more hardware cycles,” said Eric Seufert, an independent mobile analyst.
Meta was not alone in its struggles. In its characteristically splashy style, Apple debuted the Apple Vision Pro headset for virtual reality in 2024, a technological marvel that cost about as much as the average monthly mortgage payment in San Francisco. For many, spending that much — $3,500, to be precise — was a nonstarter.
Meta executives have insisted that the metaverse is not dead and that audiences’ tastes have simply changed. But the tone of the company’s messaging about the metaverse has become unmistakably humbler.
“Sometimes, we knock it out of the park,” Samantha Ryan, the vice president of content at Meta’s Reality Labs division, wrote in last month’s blog post. “Other times, we get things wrong. And when we do, we look at the data, take in feedback, make decisive adjustments to our business strategy, and keep building.”
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco.
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