Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees potential for Peloton-like fitness subscriptions in the future of virtual reality.
Zuckerberg spoke about virtual and augmented reality efforts at French tech conference VivaTech on Thursday with Publicis Groupe Chairman Maurice Levy. He said gaming is the major use case for VR today, but that there’s growing potential in areas like social experiences or fitness.
“Think about it like Peloton, where you have a subscription, but instead the device is VR and you put on your headset, and you’re in this amazing environment and you’re doing a boxing class with an instructor, or a dance class,” he said. “It’s quickly expanding beyond games into a bunch of other use cases, and we think that this is eventually going to be a big part of the next major computing platform after phones and after PCs.”
Zuckerberg said he does not believe phones or computers are going away, but that VR will someday rival that scale of importance.
Meetings could also look different in the world of VR, where people might have virtual offices where they could host staff meetings, for instance.
“Compared to video conferences, I actually think that even with the state of virtual reality today, there are a lot of reasons it actually feels better to have meetings in virtual reality,” Zuckerberg said. He added that new software will make it so that meetings will be able to happen in VR “quite well” in the near term.
This week, the company announced that it will begin testing advertisements that will appear within its Oculus virtual reality headsets. Facebook’s Oculus Quest proved popular during the coronavirus pandemic, as people sought more entertainment options at home.
