Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel dismisses Facebook’s metaverse as ‘hypothetical’

theguardian.com:

The Snapchat founder, Evan Spiegel, has dismissed Facebook’s “metaverse” ambitions as “ambiguous and hypothetical” as he announced a raft of new augmented reality features coming to phones and Snap’s experimental AR Spectacles over the next year.

Speaking ahead of the Snap Partner Summit, the company’s flagship annual event, Spiegel argued Snapchat was uniquely placed to guide the next decade of technology thanks to the company’s vast array of augmented reality services, such as the “lenses” that are used by millions of people every day.

With 332 million daily users and a market cap of $46.95bn (£38bn), Snap is comfortably larger than Twitter, even after the acquisition offer for the latter from Elon Musk, but gets a fraction of the attention. “That’s something that sort of comes along with them being the ‘public town square’,” Spiegel says. “We’re happy with the value that we provide to our community – and society.”

He cites statistics that “over 90% of Snapchatters say they feel comfortable, happy, and connected when they use Snapchat”, which is “ranked the No 1 happiest platform when compared to other apps”.

“There’s now like 250 million people engaging with AR everyday on the smartphone alone,” Spiegel said. “And that’s on this tiny little screen that you’re looking through and you’re using your thumbs on. So we believe that trying to break some of those constraints, and go into a truly immersive and interactive AR experience, will be really important in the future.”

Snap’s latest Spectacles have only shipped in prototype form to creators around the world: with a 15- to 30-minute battery life and a severely restricted display, they are intended to inspire creators with the possibility of future versions of the same