Facebook owner Meta loses a billion per month on its AR/VR division, but believes it will be worth it

Meta is continuing to plough billions of dollars into its AR/VR division Reality Labs, despite losses of more than $1bn every month for most of the last two years.

The Facebook and Meta Quest owner’s latest launch is a refreshed range of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which shrink the company’s hardware into a pair of designer specs.

New features here include video calling and an AI that can respond to questions based on what you’re looking at. But Reality Labs as a whole is still nowhere close to turning a profit, and in its latest financial results has said it expects losses to increase as it deepens its investment.

In the financial quarter ending March 31st, Reality Labs recorded $440m in revenue but an overall loss of $3.85bn. As a whole, however, Meta remains profitable – with a net income of $12.4bn for the same period, up 117 percent year-on-year.

“Historically, investing to build these new scaled experiences in our apps has been a very good long-term investment for us and for investors who have stuck with us,” Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said. “And the initial signs are quite positive here too. But building the leading AI will also be a larger undertaking than the other experiences we’ve added to our apps, and this is likely going to take several years.”

So what’s next from Meta – and what might be the product that finally takes AR mainstream? Projected imagery for your environment is coming to Quest 3 headsets later this year, but greater enhancements for glasses sound like they’re further away.

This week, an Android Central interview with Meta’s Caitlin Kalinowski suggested the company’s upcoming Project Nazarre glasses – which will allow for virtual objects to be overlaid convincingly onto your real-world surroundings with a high field of view – were still several years off. Meta hopes these will be the company’s ‘iPhone moment’, when the product hits the mainstream, and everyone in the world suddenly wants one for themselves.

And in the meantime, Meta will continue spending money to get there.