Dispatch From Las Vegas

Meta Platforms isn’t the only company betting on a bright future for the metaverse. The annual CES tech show in Las Vegas is happening this week, and seemingly everyone is talking about it.

Barron's Eric Savitz is on the ground reporting from the scene. The tech confab is much, much smaller this year. Blame Omicron for that. Eric writes:

The January 2020 edition of CES, the last live version before an all-virtual event in 2021, attracted more than 170,000 people, according to data published by the Consumer Technology Association. While there’s no hard data yet, I’d estimate that this year’s event is between a quarter and a third of the usual crowd size. The evidence was everywhere. 

On Wednesday morning, I walked from my hotel on the south end of the Strip to the Venetian ahead of the opening of the show floor at 10 a.m. Crossing one of the pedestrian bridges that cross Las Vegas Boulevard, I noticed that there were literally no cars —zero—moving in either direction. The scene was eerily post-apocalyptic, like an episode of The Walking Dead. Later in the day, I went to the heart of the show, the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, in most years a rustling crossroads overrun by people late for appointments. At midday, the place was unearthly quiet.

In addition to the usual novel and weird technologies and consumer electronics on display, the metaverse is getting plenty of buzz at this year's CES. HTC is showing off its lineup of virtual reality headsets. A subsidiary of LG demonstrated virtual reality hardware for patient care like physical and occupational therapy. And Qualcomm’s CEO waxed poetic about the prevalence of his company’s Snapdragon processors used in VR and AR headsets.

As for Meta Platforms, the company formerly known as Facebook, which plans to invest $10 billion in developing the metaverse this year, did not make an appearance at CES. Another conspicuously absent company is Apple, as Eric points out.

The crucial missing ingredient is creating a pair of AR glasses that the average person will find appealing to wear—that won’t make it look like you’ve joined The Borg collective. And it turns out that the answer could actually come from Apple , which is supposed to be launching an AR headset later this year.

Read more of Eric's reporting from CES here and here.