Snapchat founder and CEO Evan Spiegel didn't have a lot of praise for the new metaverse trend. In an interview with The Guardian, Spiegel said that the reason the company doesn't use the term metaverse, is because it is "ambiguous and hypothetical."
Spiegel said that if you ask people in a room to define the metaverse, then you will get different answers because, "everyone's definition is totally different."
Also Read: Explainer | What is a Metaverse and why is everyone talking about it?
Talking to The Verge, Spiegel said that companies that are pitching the metaverse as the future are talking about, "something that doesn't exist yet," as opposed to things like Augmented Reality (AR), where there "are 250 million people engaging with AR everyday in just the Snapchat application."
"And that's on this tiny little screen, that people use their thumbs on," he says that breaking, "some of those constraints," to "go into a truly immersive and interactive AR experience, will be really important in the future.”
Spiegel said that a lot of the metaverse and its tools are, "designed to replace reality," but AR augments the real world around you, instead of replacing it.
"So our fundamental bet is that people actually love the real world: they want to be together in person with their friends," added Spiegel.
The Snapchat CEO believes Snap's vision of the future is "real today," citing the company's foray into AR glasses with a platform, "that works at scale," right now.
"So we try to stay away from those hypotheticals, because we’re focused on what we’re building right now,” Spiegel concluded.
Also Read: Flipkart to foray into Web3 and Metaverse
The buzz around the hypothetical Web3 and Metaverse has only gotten louder in the recent years.
Meta, formerly Facebook, is all set to open its first physical store in the US, that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says will give people, "a sense for what's coming as we build towards the future."
Facebook isn't the only company on this journey, Microsoft is on board, Ubisoft is already partnering with various companies to explore Web3 and metaverse, Epic Games has managed to secure funding from Sony and Kirkbi to work on building the metaverse.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, as many companies have all started building towards a hypothetical virtual world, that they hope, will one day become real.
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