The opening of the Meta store makes tangible what is largely a theoretical future business for the world’s largest social media company, which has invested heavily in virtual and augmented reality in a push to build the “metaverse,” a term used to describe immersive, shared virtual spaces.

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg
In the meantime, with growth slowing and the company still almost entirely reliant on digital ads for revenue, Meta is cutting back on some of its long-term investments.

In addition to promoting its hardware devices to consumers, Meta is increasingly pitching them to businesses. It gave a demonstration at the store of conference calls that can feature a mix of virtual reality avatars and traditional video calling.

The company is experimenting with augmented reality technology that would enable users to join conferences as avatars via Portal, without donning headsets, said Micah Collins, a director of product management working on the enterprise tools.

Collins acknowledged the enterprise metaverse business is nascent, and a spokesperson said most usage of Horizon Workrooms, the VR conferencing technology, comes from inside Meta.
Still, Collins said, the company senses opportunity.

Although many products are still very early stage and known in their consumer context, “there’s enough there that’s giving us a lot of confidence to attack the space,” he said.