Four years ago, Meta rebranded its entire company around virtual reality. Now, they’ve announced they will discontinue Horizon Workrooms and lay off 1,500 Reality Labs employees. A stunning and expensive reverse. They are not alone. Microsoft has retired Mesh, transferred its HoloLens contract to a defense contractor, and its Places app, quite frankly, feels increasingly irrelevant. Amazon shut down its Chime collaboration service while mandating its own employees return to the office five days a week. Google’s impressive but expensive Beam telepresence system remains a niche curiosity at $50,000 per installation. The common thread? Every major technology company has pivoted aggressively toward artificial intelligence, and away from immersive virtual reality. For commercial real estate stakeholders and workplace technology professionals, this collective retreat offers crucial lessons about evaluating emerging technologies and understanding what actually drives value in the built environment. Meta: How AI Killed the Metaverse The metaverse did not simply fail, it was killed by […]