The future of Facebook might be in the mall.
The first physical retail outpost of the company formerly known as Facebook is not likely to draw much foot traffic from customers who don’t wear a Meta employee badge. That’s because it’s not located in Union Square or Westfield San Francisco Centre but rather in Burlingame, tucked into thegiant's waterfront campus just a few feet from an on-site Equator coffee shop.
Aside from the Quest, the showroom also serves as a place to test-drive two other pieces of technology. Portal is a video conferencing tablet that was released in 2018 and had a moment in the early days of the pandemic. The second gadget, Ray-Ban Stories, does much less than you’d expect, for better or worse. They’re basically slick sunglasses with a hidden camera and tiny speakers.The interior of the new Meta Store in Burlingame, Calif. on May 4, 2022.
I signed up for the demo and waited for a text alerting me it was my turn, functionality clearly intended for locations in proximity to other retail. Meanwhile, I browsed through a list of games on the store’s so-called “wonder wall.” The vertical touchscreen showed demos of big-budget VR titles like “Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond” and “Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge,” plus curiosities like a nightclub emulator and their open-universe metaverse platform called “Horizon Worlds.
Then the game started and a series of floating orbs began flying toward my face. The format should be familiar to anyone who’s played “Dance Dance Revolution” or “Guitar Hero” — just punch the orbs, then punch some more. There were also incoming limbo sticks to duck and weave under, adding a core component to the workout. After five minutes, I felt a little winded, then for the last five I was transported to a volcano in Ethiopia were the pace did indeed become quite intense.
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