Meta undertook the most significant cuts to its metaverse efforts to date earlier this month, laying off a reported 1500 employees and closing multiple VR game studios. Still, CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t done with immersive media just yet.
On the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call Wednesday afternoon, Zuckerberg laid out a somewhat murky vision for a future in which AI and spatial computing turn all kinds of media into immersive 3D worlds, including all of the videos on your Instagram feed.
After briefly recapping the evolution of social media from text to images to video, Zuckerberg said: “I don't think that video is the ultimate kind of final format. We're going to get more formats that are more interactive and immersive. [...] There's definitely a version of the future where you can tap on and jump into any video that you see, engage, and experience it in a more meaningful way.”
“I think that the Investments that we've done in both a lot of the virtual reality software and Horizon, as well as a number of other areas around the company are actually going to pair well with these AI advances to be able to bring some of those experiences to hundreds of millions and billions of people through mobile,” he added.
Zuckerberg did not call any of this the metaverse, and he notably also didn’t suggest that VR would play a role in consuming any of this content. He did, however, say earlier in the call that Meta’s goal was to turn VR into “a profitable ecosystem over the coming years,” while most Reality Labs investments going forward would shift towards glasses and wearables.
“Sales of our glasses more than tripled last year, and we think that they are some of the fastest growing consumer electronics in history,” Zuckerberg said, reiterating that he envisioned most glasses to become AI glasses in the future.
Among those lofty predictions, Zuckerberg did have some hard news for investors: Meta expects that Reality Labs losses will be similar to last year in 2026, he said, adding: “This will likely be the peak as we start to gradually reduce our losses going forward while
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Photo courtesy of Meta.