CARY – While technology companies are investing in the metaverse, including Epic Games, one of the Cary-headquartered company’s executives told Yahoo Finance earlier today that people may not be interested.
Marc Petit, a vice president and general manager of Unreal Engine at Epic Games, told Daniel Howley, a Yahoo Finance reporter, that “people have kind of lost interest in the metaverse because characters look like cartoons with no legs.”
Howley noted that the comments could be read as a veiled attack on Facebook parent company Meta, which changed the company’s name and brand last year to better correspond to the emerging promise of a metaverse where people can experience reality in a three-dimensional, augmented digital space.
Meta announced, then released, the “Horizon Worlds” platform last year.
It’s not just Meta that indicated an interest in the future of the metaverse. Epic Games, too, raised $2 billion from investors to make investments in the metaverse, according to prior WRAL TechWire reporting.
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Epic Games also inked a deal with WPP earlier this year. Cary-based Epic will provide a new ‘metaverse curriculum’ with a focus on 3D development and virtual production. And that’s just the latest news. The company also formed a partnership with LEGO to construct a “kid-friendly” metaverse ecosystem.
And though the metaverse has been called a “new frontier,” perhaps people won’t want to participate.
At least, that’s what Petit told Yahoo Finance. Petit followed describing characters, rather than avatars, that look like cartoons with no legs, by adding “who wants to be that? This is not attractive.”
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