Now Amazon takes a dig at metaverse as Zuckerberg makes grand plans

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IANS | 20 May, 2022
As Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg moves ahead with his grand metaverse plans, David Limp, who is Amazon's head of devices, has said that their company would rather focus on technology that affects the real world "here and now".

Addressing the 'Future of Everything Festival' by The Wall Street Journal, Limp said that even with current technology like smartphones and wireless earbuds, it can be hard to communicate with his kids, even when they're in the same house.

"I want to try to work on technologies that bring people's heads up, get them to enjoy the real world, make the family a more communal experience," he was quoted as saying at the event.

"I really do fundamentally believe, and I think it's what we're spending a lot of time on in my organisation, that we want to enhance the here and now. I want to try and work on technologies that bring people's heads up, get them to enjoy the real world," Limp said late on Thursday.

The senior Amazon executive said that he doesn't want to live in a virtual world 24/7, or even a few hours a day.

As Meta CEO Zuckerberg makes big plans around the metaverse by spending billions of dollars, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel late last month criticised the new technology, saying the concept is "pretty ambiguous and hypothetical".

Spiegel told The Guardian that the word metaverse is never spoken in Snap's offices.

"The reason why we don't use that word is because it's pretty ambiguous and hypothetical. Just ask a room of people how to define it, and everyone's definition is totally different," he was quoted as saying.

According to him, people would rather spend time in augmented reality (AR) rather than a totally virtual one.

Limp said that the term "metaverse" was almost impossible to define.

"If I asked these few hundred people what they thought the metaverse was, we'd get 205 different answers. We don't have a common definition, it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people," he said.

Limp also said that AR glasses are better than VR because you can at least see the real world.

Meta is banking upon its big-time foray into Metaverse, with plans to invest $10 billion over the coming years.