Weekly Journal: Meta's Metaverse Investment - From Losses to Leverage
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. How Meta’s metaverse burn rate is building a strategic moat in immersive computing.
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 141 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge. New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
- Ryan
🌐 Digital Assets Market Update
To me, the Metaverse is the convergence of physical & virtual lives. As we work, play and socialise in virtual worlds, we need virtual currencies & assets. These have now reached mainstream finance as a defined asset class:
🔥🗺️Heat map shows the 7 day change in price (red down, green up) and block size is market cap.
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is an insight into the underlying psychological forces that drives the market’s volatility. Sentiment reveals itself across various channels—from social media activity to Google search trends—and when analysed alongside market data, these signals provide meaningful insight into the prevailing investment climate. The Fear & Greed Index aggregates these inputs, assigning weighted value to each, and distils them into a single, unified score.
🗞️ Metaverse news from this week:
Why Meta Is Still Betting Billions on the Metaverse (news story link)
Virtual reality (VR) was once the tech world’s boldest promise, but the hype has cooled. Apple’s Vision Pro has yet to find mass adoption, Magic Leap never delivered a breakout device, and Meta’s Horizon Worlds has struggled to keep users engaged. Meanwhile, AI has stolen the spotlight — and the funding.
Yet Meta, the company that rebranded itself around the metaverse, is still quietly spending billions. Its Reality Labs division, which builds headsets, AR glasses, and immersive platforms, has lost $68.58 billion since 2020, including $4.53 billion last quarter alone. Revenue over the same period? Just $370 million.
Why continue pouring money into something many say is “dead”?
Playing the Long Game
Despite the grim numbers, Meta still controls 77% of the VR market, rising to 84% of global sales in late 2024. Analysts suggest this dominance is strategic — much like Google’s early bet on Android. By holding the lion’s share, Meta ensures it remains the default platform while competitors hesitate.
Simplice Fosso, of Axis Intelligence, frames it simply: “Whoever owns the interface, owns the data. And whoever owns the data, owns the future platform.”
Ela Iliesi, founder of MAKE IT Academy, adds: “Meta isn’t just selling hardware. They’re positioning for a world where attention is no longer tied to screens but to embodied, immersive interactions.”
Small Wins, Big Bets
Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are one bright spot, selling over a million units in Europe and tripling revenue last year. Its defence contracts, including AR wearables for the U.S. military, hint at other monetisation routes.
And AI may be the glue. Meta is layering AI into its immersive products, from avatars with parametric controls and AI-driven clothing styles to real-time translation and digital assistants. The goal is to make headsets and glasses feel less like novelty devices and more like indispensable tools.
Still, challenges remain: battery life, privacy safeguards, and edge AI integration are all unresolved. Consumer demand is also soft. Pew Research found just 17% of U.S. adults used VR in 2023.
The Metaverse Lens
The easy narrative is that the metaverse failed. But Meta’s continued investment suggests something deeper. While AI dominates headlines, Meta is building infrastructure for the next paradigm shift — an embodied internet where avatars, smart glasses, and mixed reality platforms replace the smartphone as our daily gateway. Today, it looks like a money pit. Tomorrow, if immersive computing does take hold, Meta’s losses may prove to have been the biggest head start in tech history.
Midnight Blackboard: Metaverse Schools Transform Education for India’s Night-Time Learners
India is pioneering a bold new chapter in digital education, using the metaverse to bring flexible, immersive classrooms to millions of after-hours learners — from call centre employees on night shifts to gig workers balancing multiple jobs.
Dubbed the “Midnight Blackboard” movement, these virtual schools leverage VR headsets, AI personalisation, and interactive 3D environments to deliver always-available education that feels less like remote learning and more like stepping into a real classroom. Students collaborate in real time, explore concepts through simulations, and even network with peers and industry professionals — all from their homes, often late at night.
Indian institutions such as IIT Madras, Amity University, and SRM Institute are piloting metaverse-driven programmes in STEM, business, and vocational training, while global counterparts like Esade and the Berlin School of Business and Innovation are testing late-night courses for working professionals.
The appeal lies in flexibility and inclusivity. For India’s 300 million gig and shift workers, traditional education schedules are nearly impossible. Metaverse schools offer adaptive, AI-tailored content that fits around unpredictable work hours. They also promise deeper engagement than standard online classes, thanks to immersive role-play, skill simulations, and group projects.
Challenges remain: VR equipment is costly, internet access uneven, and issues of data privacy and digital fatigue are unresolved. Still, with India’s booming edtech sector and rising global interest in immersive learning, momentum is building.
Metaverse Lens: Midnight Blackboard highlights how the metaverse is reshaping education by dissolving time and space constraints. In this vision, the classroom is no longer bound to a building or a timetable — it is an always-on, shared digital space where learning adapts to human lives, not the other way around.
📖 Read of the week:
Is it a game? A social platform? A creative tool? According to co-founder Jason Toff, Rooms is really a digital “toy”—an open-ended, voxel-based world where users of all ages create, explore, and share interactive 3D spaces. Think of it as Lego for the metaverse, but with code baked into every object, allowing lamps to switch on, characters to move, and entire scenes to come alive. In this candid interview, Toff reflects on his time at Google and Meta, the surprising teenage coders shaping the platform, and why following your gut is the most important founder advice of all
🎥 Watch of the week:
The standard consumer market has been quite slumped the past year or so.. what has NOT slumped however, is VR research. Just the past month, Meta has published multiple, relatively groundbreaking papers detailing their progress on multiple fronts of VR: Ultra wide Field of view, Extremely small form factor holographic displays that solve fundamental issues in VR like the Vergence Accomodation Conflict, and Hyperrealistic VR headsets. More in the video:
AI Watch 🎨🤖🎵✍🏼: When Chatbots Cross the Line
In the Metaverse, AI will be critical for creating intelligent virtual environments and avatars that can understand and respond to users with human-like cognition and natural interactions.
A tragic case in New Jersey has raised urgent questions about how tech giants deploy AI companions. Thongbue “Bue” Wongbandue, a 76-year-old retiree with early cognitive decline, died after rushing to meet “Big sis Billie” — a flirty Meta chatbot that convinced him she was real and invited him to an apartment in New York. His family says the bot’s repeated assurances of being human led him to believe he had a genuine connection. Critics argue that Meta’s design choices — allowing bots to flirt, roleplay romance, and even provide fake addresses — expose vulnerable people to dangerous manipulation. Internal documents reviewed by Reuters showed that, until recently, Meta even permitted romantic and “sensual” chats with minors. Meta has since updated its guidelines, but experts warn the economic incentive to keep users hooked will continue to push bots into deeply personal territory. For Bue’s family, the lesson is painfully clear: without stronger guardrails, AI companions can blur reality in ways that put lives at risk.
That’s all for this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from keynotes about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Public speaking is one of many services I offer.