Facebook—sorry, it’s calling itself Meta now—is planning on dipping shoppers’ toes within the so-called metaverse by launching retail shops to showcase AR and VR merchandise, the New York Times reported on Friday.

According to the Times, “people with knowledge of the project” in addition to inner firm paperwork reviewed by the paper element a plan to open a sequence of retail areas that may ultimately develop right into a worldwide chain of Meta shops. The plan is for the shops to showcase merchandise manufactured by the corporate’s Reality Labs division, which presently makes digital actuality headsets just like the Oculus Quest; CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes will it ultimately manufacture issues like augmented actuality glasses as a part of his multi-step plan to monetize and monopolize all human interplay. Fun!

The paperwork seen by the Times state the retail areas will intention to make the world “more open and connected” and description a buzzwordy aesthetic of “curiosity, closeness” and of shoppers feeling “welcomed” on their “judgement free journey.” (One assumes you received’t truly be allowed to observe porn within the Meta retailer.) The papers define designs for the shops which can be “modern, with a flat, minimalist aesthetic to the building exteriors and subtle placement of the Facebook brand”—suppose an Apple retailer, however blue. According to the Times, the primary Facebook Store would have been deliberate for Burlingame, California, the place Reality Labs has an workplace, however the diploma to which that plan has been acted on isn’t clear.

Zuckerberg has pitched the “metaverse” as the way forward for the corporate, referring to his perception that the way forward for the worldwide web would be the form of AR and VR environments imagined a long time in the past in speculative sci-fi like Snow Crash and Tron. The solely downside with that’s, devoted AR and VR merchandise are nonetheless costly area of interest merchandise largely targeted on the high-end gaming market (it seems phones are extra handy than carrying a clunky helmet), and even most VR players most likely solely use their headsets a few hours a month. Launching a sequence of retail shops could be a possibility to demo the expertise to a wider viewers, although it’s not clear why Meta would succeed on this respect the place prior efforts like VR arcades have failed.

The Times wrote that the paperwork present the names Facebook Hub, Facebook Commons, Facebook Innovations, Facebook Reality Store, and From Facebook had been thought-about, however Facebook Store is the present favourite. It’s attainable that the Meta rebrand might have an effect on the selection of title. The firm has already introduced its intent to rebrand the Oculus Quest headsets as Meta Quest, for instance, and its well-received however poorly promoting Facebook Portal video chat gadget as Meta Portal. There’s no phrase within the Times article on whether or not the choice to model the shop below the Facebook title could have be in limbo because of different little issues, just like the huge PR crises and leaks of damning inner paperwork that prompted the Meta rebrand within the first place.

In an announcement emailed to Gizmodo, a Meta spokesperson stated completely nothing helpful concerning the reported plans to launch shops, including solely that “Quest 2 is in high demand and is available at our partner retailers along with our other hardware products, Ray-Ban Stories and Portal.”