Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, announced on Thursday that the business intends to enter the metaverse and spend to study its possibilities.
Cook was asked about the prospects afforded by the metaverse in a Business Insider piece on Thursday. Tim Cook speculated on what the future of the metaverse might hold for Apple, saying, “Well, that’s a big question. But we’re a company in the business of innovation, so we’re always exploring new and emerging technologies.
And I’ve spoken at length about how this area is very interesting to us … Right now, we have over 14,000 ARKit apps in the App Store, which provide incredible AR experiences for millions of people today … We see a lot of potential in this space, and are investing accordingly.”
Augmented Reality (AR) is one of the ways that users can use AR headsets to enter virtual worlds that make up the metaverse. Apple’s development platform for such apps called ARKit.
The metaverse, on the other hand, refers to virtual environments where users can construct their own avatars to work, play, learn, and even build.
The metaverse gained prominence in 2021, when Facebook relaunched and became known as Meta. Since then, numerous large corporations have entered the sector, including Samsung, which opened a store in the metaverse, and the Australian Open, which put up a virtual environment that replicated the actual event.
In December, Goldman Sachs analyst Eric Sheridan stated that virtual worlds might be worth $8 trillion, reiterating Morgan Stanley’s prediction that monetization of AR customers in the United States alone would generate such a large sum.
Tim Cook made the comments during an analyst call on Thursday to discuss Apple’s fiscal first-quarter earnings report, which was announced after the market closed. While the firm reports that revenue increased 11% year over year to $123.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2021.
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