Meta vs. Apple: The Battle for Social Experience on XR Headsets
Meta’s Fragmented Social Strategy
Meta, as a leading social media company, has been striving to create a rich social experience on its XR headsets with the launch of Horizon Worlds. This virtual space allows users to build and engage in novel virtual games and experiences, laying the foundation for Meta’s ‘metaverse’ concept. However, outside of Horizon, the social experience on Meta’s Quest platform remains highly fragmented.
Interacting with friends on Meta’s headsets involves navigating through a landscape of different apps, each with its own invite system, avatar options, and interface. Some apps even require separate accounts and friends lists. This fragmented approach makes it challenging for users to simply hang out with their friends and engage in activities they already enjoy.
In addition, many apps on Quest lack social features altogether. Users may create amazing content or want to watch a movie together, but the absence of integrated sharing options means they have to resort to workarounds like taking screenshots or transferring media to external devices.
Apple’s Social Strategy on Vision Pro
Apple takes a different approach with Vision Pro by making social interaction the norm rather than the exception. The company aims to provide a cohesive social experience across its platform by offering a common set of tools and guidelines for developers.
Apple leverages its existing ecosystem of apps and social technologies, such as SharePlay, to make its first-party apps social right out of the box. SharePlay allows users to watch, listen, and experience apps together through FaceTime. Apple expects most visionOS apps to support SharePlay, promoting a seamless transition from one app to another while staying connected with friends.
On Vision Pro, apps incorporating SharePlay will feature ‘Spatial Personas,’ avatars generated from users’ facial scans, ensuring a consistent look across shared experiences. Apple also provides pre-configured room layouts for different types of content, eliminating the need for developers to manage user placement and movement.
SharePlay on Vision Pro synchronizes apps between users, offering a low-latency and secure data sharing experience. This allows friends to engage in activities while maintaining privacy and security.
Seamless Social Interaction
Apple’s emphasis is on leveraging users’ existing personal connections, such as friends from messaging or email platforms. Rather than focusing on launching individual apps and then inviting friends to join, Vision Pro prioritizes bringing friends together first. Users can initiate a Group FaceTime call with their existing contacts, enabling virtual face-to-face conversations before deciding on activities.
The social experience on Vision Pro revolves around familiar activities and existing relationships. Users can seamlessly transition from one app to another, allowing them to watch a movie, listen to music, or engage in other shared interests with friends without interruptions.
Social by Default
Even apps without built-in multi-user experiences can adopt a social aspect by enabling one user to screen-share the app with others. Although only the host can interact with the content, all participants can observe and discuss it in real-time.
Meta’s Early Effort with Facebook Spaces
Ironically, Meta previously experimented with a similar approach through its Facebook Spaces app. The app allowed users to gather virtually, leveraging friends on Facebook, and interact around personal photo and video content. While the effort showed promise, Meta did not fully develop the concept and eventually discontinued Facebook Spaces.
Challenges and Limitations
While Apple’s SharePlay initiative on Vision Pro facilitates social interactions for basic flat apps, it presents certain limitations for immersive multiplayer gaming experiences:
- SharePlay experiences are limited to five participants due to performance considerations.
- Interactive capabilities between users might be restricted to predefined gestures like handshakes and high-fives, with Spatial Personas remaining physically separate.
For fully immersive social experiences, such as multiplayer games, developers may require more extensive networking options, personalized avatars, and increased user capacity. In such cases, SharePlay might not meet their requirements.
