Major South Korean tech giant Samsung made an official announcement yesterday announcing that its upcoming Unpacked event, which will be streaming today, will be available not only in virtual but also in person format. And as it became known, fans of the idea of the metaverse will be able to watch this exhibition in 837X, recreated on the basis of the Decentraland virtual reality platform, Samsung’s flagship store in New York.
And what makes this “Metaverse” Samsung event so interesting is how little the company has talked about virtual reality in recent years. The South Korean giant, if you’re not aware, was one of the first companies to really make big headway in the world of augmented and virtual reality with the release of Gear VR, a smartphone-based virtual reality platform. Once known as one of the cheapest and most popular VR headset options, Samsung announced that it plans to phase out Gear VR last December with no plans to replace it.
Be that as it may, it is impossible to argue that absolutely any company should proceed with extreme caution in the metaverse, just as in any other new field, especially since many experts in the field of business and technology believe that this is “simply marketing trick”. For example, shares of Meta Corporation, the parent company of Facebook, fell more than 26% last week. It happened shortly after the company reported its earnings. What’s more, it also revealed that Meta lost more than $10 billion on Reality Labs, its division responsible for the development of augmented and virtual reality.
However, even despite the losses, significant hype around the metaverse does not seem to subside. A number of companies, including Walmart, Microsoft, Nike, and Disney, are already heavily investing heavily in the Metaverse. And although now interest in virtual reality is higher than ever, it is still considered a niche product, while augmented reality is something really useful, functional and necessary in extremely limited areas. Therefore, many began to fear for Samsung, which may also want to prove itself in this extremely vague area, the first hint of which is the Unpacked format.
