Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Meta\u2019s total investment in virtual and augmented reality is set to top $100bn this year, as its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has declared 2025 will be a \u201cdefining year\u201d for its smart glasses. In its latest annual report, Meta revealed it invested $19.9bn in its Reality Labs division last year, hitting a new high after more than a decade of heavy losses. The unit develops its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which Zuckerberg last week called a \u201creal hit\u201d, as well as its Quest VR headsets, which have been slower to take off. The company sold 1mn sets of its Ray-Ban glasses in 2024, according to a person familiar with the matter.The Silicon Valley-based company\u2019s cumulative investment in VR and AR product development and acquisitions has now exceeded $80bn since the initiative began in 2014 when it bought VR headset maker Oculus, according to analyst estimates and the Financial Times\u2019 calculations based on company disclosures. Meta\u2019s annual report said it expected the division\u2019s annual investments to increase further in 2025, suggesting that more than $20bn would be added to that total this year. The figures show the extraordinary cost of Zuckerberg\u2019s long-term effort to build a new computing platform that could one day replace smartphones and reduce Meta\u2019s dependence on Apple\u2019s and Google\u2019s devices for distribution of its apps and services. As part of this, Zuckerberg is racing to develop more sophisticated AR glasses that overlay content on to the real world, unveiling its prototype Orion in September as rivals Apple and Google work on similar products.\u201cMeta\u2019s investments in Reality Labs are eye watering, yet it\u2019s not clear if they are unreasonable if you believe it can build the business that it\u2019s looking to be, which is replacing [Apple\u2019s] iOS,\u201d said Matthew Ball, a tech investor and author of The Metaverse. Meta declined to comment. Three years after Facebook\u2019s parent company rebranded itself as Meta to highlight its vision of building a \u201cmetaverse\u201d, or online virtual world, Reality Labs brought in $2.1bn in revenue in 2024, up 13 per cent on the previous year. Its operating losses hit a new high of $17.7bn last year, up 10 per cent. Reality Labs has generated $10.1bn in revenue since 2019, the first year that Meta started to disclose financial results for the unit. Over the past year, Zuckerberg has shifted focus away from talking about creating an avatar-filled metaverse to touting its progress in developing smart glasses powered by rapidly developing AI technology. In Meta\u2019s earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg was enthusiastic about the outlook for its \u201cAI glasses\u201d, which are produced in partnership with Ray-Ban\u2019s parent company EssilorLuxottica. \u201cThis will be a defining year that determines if we\u2019re on a path towards many hundreds of millions and eventually, billions of AI glasses, and glasses being the next computing platform like we\u2019ve been talking about for some time \u2014 or if this is just going to be a longer grind,\u201d he said. The lightweight glasses have tiny cameras, microphones and speakers built in, allowing the wearer to take photos, listen to music and chat with an AI assistant. Meta is planning to release a new version of its smart glasses later this year that feature a small display for the first time, the Financial Times has previously reported. Its Quest VR headsets, which cost $300 and up for the latest model, are still struggling to achieve mainstream appeal, with analysts and games developers estimating it has sold about 30mn units to date. Zuckerberg said the number of people using its Quest devices and Horizon operating system \u201chas been steadily growing\u201d. Ball said Meta\u2019s long-term investment of tens of billions of dollars into VR and AR was not dissimilar in scale to other efforts by Big Tech companies to enter new product categories, comparing it to Microsoft\u2019s Bing search engine, Amazon\u2019s Alexa assistant and Echo devices, and Google\u2019s cloud computing unit. He estimates Meta\u2019s total investment to date in Reality Labs to be $85bn, compared with more than $40bn for Amazon\u2019s Alexa and $20bn-$30bn for Apple\u2019s development of its Vision Pro headset, a more expensive rival to Meta\u2019s Quest. \u201cA lot of attention is paid to Zuckerberg\u2019s bet on Reality Labs but that is partly because they choose to discretely report it,\u201d Ball said. \u201cAll of their competitors have investments that are comparable that they don\u2019t surface.\u201d Meta\u2019s Reality Labs investments are smaller than the \u201chundreds of billions of dollars\u201d that Zuckerberg said he planned to spend on AI infrastructure \u201cover the long term\u201d. Despite these capital-intensive efforts, Meta remains highly profitable, thanks to its lucrative online advertising business. Net income grew by 60 per cent last year to $62.4bn. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Meta\u2019s total investment in virtual and augmented reality is set to top $100bn this year, as its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has declared 2025 will be<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-191148","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}