After months of anticipation, the Meta Store — a retail space to discover Portal, Ray-Ban Stories and Quest 2 and try them out in person — will finally open its doors on May 9. The company’s first retail location will be on the Meta Burlingame campus in California, which is also home to its Metaverse-focused Reality Labs section. It will be open Monday through Friday.
The store offers customers the opportunity to test out Meta’s different devices, including the Portal, Meta Quest 2, and Ray-Ban Stories, Meta’s less feature-rich version of Google Glass. However, while Meta will offer the first two items directly in-store, you will still need to order the smart glasses from Ray-Ban through a salesman. New features have been added to the company’s Meta.com site, including a new area for online purchasing.
In terms of the Quest 2, Meta’s VR hardware that was previously sold under the now-defunct Oculus brand, customers can try out a respectable selection of games, including rhythm game Beat Saber, VR fitness title Supernatural, GOLF+, and Real VR Fishing, which caters to the virtual dad market segment.
On this one, Mark Zuckerberg pretty much revealed everything last week in an Instagram photo picturing him using VR much like anybody else does, in a futuristic Apple-like retail atmosphere with large wraparound screens and Nikes, like anyone might wear in the future. According to a report from The New York Times published late this year, the company has been interested in retail locations since at least 2020.
It may be argued that this is the metaverse, though. Is there a real-world connection between our virtual identities and the digital retail experiences we use? Because you can’t sell people anything in the metaverse without first getting them into it, Meta has every reason to get its VR devices into as many hands as possible. Considering that Meta/Facebook didn’t already have a physical store, it’s a little odd. However, it is now possible.
