In another groundbreaking move to strengthen its hold on the AR/VR space, Meta has announced it is opening applications for the African version of its program. The new Meta initiative is geared towards supporting African talents under the Meta Global XR Fund.
Meta Opens AR/VR Africa Metathon
The latest development sponsored by Meta is an Africa-wide program aimed at building innovative solutions for use cases in Africa. It is an extension of Meta’s metaverse drive to ensure an inclusive training program targeted at Africa.
Accordingly, the AR/VR hackathon is set to feature three critical components to take place across 16 countries physically and virtually. In addition, there is intensive training to strengthen the acquired skills at the end of the program.
Phil Oduor, Meta’s Policy Program Lead for Africa, revealed that the program represents an opportunity to show how Africans can use artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and augmented reality to build robust infrastructures depicting African reality.
The project lead added that Meta’s XR Programs and Research Fund has a two-year duration with $50 million in grants. The program is a research project focused on developing the metaverse to make it humanly accommodating and immersive.
Furthermore, Oduor noted that the partnership with the augmented reality developers Imisi 3D and BlackRhino is to boost Africa’s creative and innovative space to show the various concepts of the metaverse in Africa.
Meta’s Expanding Metaverse Investment
The Facebook parent company has a well-known relationship with the virtual world, going by its past and present activities. It is well known that the change of name from Facebook to Meta was Mark Zuckerberg’s intention to focus on expanding the virtual ecosystem.
Moreover, the first three months of 2022 have been tough for Meta as its metaverse entity, Reality Labs, suffered a $2.96 billion loss. Since 2021, Mark Zuckerberg has plunged more than $10 billion into the metaverse project, and the loss did not deter the billionaire.
Zuckerberg reiterated that Neta is focused on laying the foundation for the metaverse, which is envisioned for the next decade. The company is focused on the more significant opportunities in the metaverse, which explains why it has pumped enormous resources into building the next-era technology.
Meta has launched Horizon Worlds, a virtual reality social platform that Zuckerberg noted as the core of its metaverse strategy. Meta also unveiled the VR applications of the Horizon Worlds last December.
However, the virtual social reality ecosystem has yet to churn revenue for the company. Other VR applications are set to hit the market later in the year as Meta continues to stake its claim on the virtual space.
It is not just the Meta CEO who is confident about the project; most top brands are also bullish. Competition is rife, with Apple Inc. also joining the fray, and Meta has the edge over others due to its early entry.
Meanwhile, it would be interesting to see how the competition could lead to a more immersive virtual experience.
Source: https://crypto.news/meta-partners-imisi-3d-and-blackrhino-to-launch-ar-vr-africa-metathon/