American tech giant Meta will continue to invest in virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR). By the end of 2025, the company’s investments in this area will exceed $100 billion, writes the Financial Times. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called 2025 a “defining year” for its smart glasses.
Over the course of its history, the company has invested more than $80 billion in the development of VR and AR products and the expansion of the related business, including $19.9 billion in 2024.
Meta began to develop this segment with the purchase of the developer of virtual reality headsets Oculus in 2014. This segment is now called Reality Labs.
Reality Labs, among other things, develops Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest VR headsets. According to an informed source of the FT, Meta sold 1 million Ray-Ban glasses in 2024. Total Quest sales over the entire period amount to about 30 million sets, according to estimates by game developers and analysts.
The company plans to launch a new version of Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025 in partnership with the brand’s owner EssilorLuxottica, the FT notes.
“This year will be a defining year in terms of whether we are on track to have many hundreds of millions and eventually billions of AI glasses and for them to become, as we’ve been saying for a while, the next computing platform, or whether this is just going to be a stretch,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week at a conference call on the fourth quarter of 2024.
