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Meta Platforms (META) Boosts Prospects With New VR Features

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Meta Platforms (META - Free Report) is looking to boost its growth prospects by launching Meta House at Miami art week. The Meta House will showcase new mixed reality experiences like a VR art gallery, interactive AR murals and VR sculpting workshops with hopes of attracting various artists and customers to the metaverse.

Meta Platforms’ latest offering at the Miami Art Week will provide mixed reality experiences like live performances by Pop artists Doja Cat, GRAMMY nominee GloRilla and emerging artists COVL and YONK.

The company has already been undertaking various initiatives to help creators develop their own businesses in the metaverse. The company announced several new features and tools across Facebook and Instagram for creators in the first half of 2022.

Creators are expected to play a key role in developing the metaverse economy. META’s latest initiatives will surely benefit them in creating attractive brands and products, and artists for the metaverse.

It is also testing tools to sell digital assets and services in the virtual reality platform — Horizon Worlds, an early iteration of the metaverse. This is a massive step for Mark Zuckerberg's bold ambitions to create the metaverse, as it will allow the development of commercial activity in the alternate reality independent of the real world. Metaverse, upon completion, is expected to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce and support millions of jobs and new projects for creators and developers.

Meta’s launch of its latest solution for the metaverse reflects the company’s strategy to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to build the metaverse upon which Zuckerberg has rested the company’s future.

META Looking to Boost Top Line by Investing in Metaverse

The metaverse market, globally, is expected to reach $800 billion by 2024, per a Bloomberg report. According to the latest report from Fortune Business Insights, the global metaverse market is expected to witness a CAGR of 47.6% between 2022 and 2029 to reach from an estimated $100.27 billion in 2022 to $1,527.55 billion by 2029.

However, Zuckerberg’s bold ambition to restructure Meta Platforms as a company primarily operating in the metaverse is facing various challenges.

The company is facing its worst downfall in many years being negatively impacted by its falling revenue growth from its advertisement business segment.

META’s top-line growth in the third quarter was also significantly affected due to negative forex impact.

Rising inflation also hurt the ad spending budgets of enterprises, which weighed on the ad revenues of the company in the last reported quarter.

Meta Platforms’ ad revenue business is facing a decline due to ad targeting-related headwinds created by Apple’s (AAPL - Free Report) iOS changes.

Apple’s iOS changes have made ad targeting difficult, which has increased the cost of driving outcomes. Meta Platforms’ advertisement revenues decreased 3.7% year over year to $27.24 billion in the third quarter, and it expects these factors to hurt advertising growth in the fourth quarter of 2022.

These reasons have impacted the stock negatively as it pummeled 67.4% in the year-to-date period compared with the Zacks Computer and Technology sector’s fall of 32.2%.

However, META, which currently carries Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), is banking its revenue growth in the coming quarters on solid return on investments from its investment in AI and ML and partnerships with other PyTorch foundation co-founders Microsoft (MSFT - Free Report) and NVIDIA (NVDA - Free Report) . You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Meta Platforms recently launched its first high-end virtual reality headset, Meta Quest Pro, at the Meta Connect event. Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella joined Zuckerberg at the event to announce the new partnership, bringing new work and productivity tools like Microsoft 365 and Teams to Meta Quest Pro and Meta Quest 2 next year.

Meta Platforms has collaborated with NVIDIA to build an AI research supercomputer, helping META AI researchers to build different AI models crucial for creating the metaverse.

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