Meta continues to draw criticism for how it handles younger consumers using its platforms, but the company is also designing new products to cater to them. On Monday the company was announced in a blog post that later this year it will launch a new educational product for Quest to position its VR headset as a first device for teaching in classrooms.
The product has yet to be named, but in a blog post describing it, Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs — the ex-politician turned Meta executive most likely to deliver messages on more controversial and divisive topics — said it would includes a hub for education-specific apps and features, as well as the ability to manage multiple headsets at once without having to update each device individually.
Business models for hardware and services have yet to be clarified. With nothing on the table, the company is framing it as a long-term bet.
“We accept that it’s going to take a long time and we’re not going to make money out of it any time soon,” Clegg said in an interview with Worthy.
On the plus side, a push into education could mean more diverse content for Quest users, along with a wider ecosystem of developers building for the platform — not what killer app detractors say VR still lacks, but at least more action.
On more troubling ground, the news comes on the heels of some other developments at the company that are less positive. Meta’s instant messaging service WhatsApp has gotten a lot of heat due to the lowering of the minimum age for users to 13 in the UK and EU (it was previously 16).
Monday’s announcement comes on the heels of Meta urging Quest users to verify their age so it can offer teens and pre-teens the right experiences.
The new initiative will be launched later this year and will only be available to institutions with pupils aged 13 and over. Meta said it will launch first in the 20 markets where it already supports Quest for Business, Meta’s $14.99/month workplace-focused subscription. This list includes the US, Canada, the UK, and many other English-speaking markets, along with Japan and much of Western Europe.
There are already several companies on the market exploring the idea of virtual reality in the classroom, with names like Immersion VR, ClassVR and ArborVR, not to mention the likes of Microsoft, which is pushing HoloLens as an educational tool for some time now.
It’s not clear how widespread VR use is in schools: one provider, ClassVR, claims 40,000 classrooms worldwide use its products.
However, there are still barriers to mass market adoption. It’s not clear, for example, whether sticking an earpiece to someone’s face is necessarily helpful in a live, educational setting, given some of the research surrounding young people already receiving too much screen time as it is.
And another big question mark will be related to the cost of buying headsets (the Quest 3, the latest headset, starts at about $500 each for base models), buying apps, and then supporting all that infrastructure. Meta said he already has donate Look for headsets at 15 universities in the US, but it’s unclear how far it will go to subsidize growth in the long term.
