Meta, the parent company of social networking giant Facebook, will construct a retail store in the San Francisco Peninsula that will sell virtual reality hardware. It will also feature a wall-to-wall curved LED screen that displays what users see using Meta VR headsets.
Meta announced on Monday that a retail location in Burlingame, California would open on May 9 to provide interactive demos for the company’s hardware products, which include virtual reality headsets, video communications displays, and smart eyewear.
The store, which will be on the Meta campus (the company’s offices are in Menlo Park), will include a wall-to-wall curved LED screen that will show what users view when they wear Meta headsets.
“The Meta Store is going to let consumers see how our items can be the future entrance to the Metaverse,” said Martin Gilliard, the store’s manager. “We don’t sell the Metaverse in our store, but we hope that people will come in and learn a little bit more about how our products may help them connect to it.”
In October 2021, Facebook changed to Meta, stating that its focus was moving beyond social media at the time and later introducing its Metaverse ambition for linking online social experiences with the physical world.
Despite the fact that software companies such as Apple have physical locations around the world, Facebook’s 2.9 billion users have not been able to visit one since the company was created in 2004.
Many companies are buying virtual properties in the Metaverse, with electronics giant Samsung opening a metaverse store in the blockchain-powered realm of Decentraland in January. According to reports, major stores such as Walmart are also planning to go Meta.