Meta continues to area criticism over the way it handles youthful customers utilizing its platforms, however the firm can be planning new merchandise that can cater to them. On Monday, the corporate introduced in a weblog publish that later this 12 months it is going to be launching a brand new training product for Quest to place its VR headset as a go-to gadget for instructing in lecture rooms.

The product is but to be named, however within the weblog publish describing it, Nick Clegg, the corporate’s president of world affairs — the ex-politician who has turn out to be’s Meta’s government more than likely to be delivering messaging round extra controversial and divisive matters — mentioned that it’s going to embrace a hub for education-specific apps and options, in addition to the flexibility to handle a number of headsets directly with out having to replace every gadget individually.

Enterprise fashions for {hardware} and providers even have but to be spelled out. With nothing on the desk, the corporate is framing it as a long-term guess.

“We settle for that it’s going to take a very long time, and we’re not going to be making any cash on this anytime quickly,” Clegg mentioned in an interview with Axios.

On the plus aspect, a push into training may imply extra diversified content material for Quest customers, together with a wider ecosystem of builders constructing for the platform — not the killer app critics say remains to be lacking from VR, however no less than extra motion.

On extra problematic floor, the information is approaching the heels of some different developments on the firm which are much less constructive. Meta’s prompt messaging service WhatsApp has been getting a variety of warmth over reducing the minimal age for customers to 13 within the U.Okay. and EU (it had beforehand been 16).

Monday’s announcement arrives on the heels of Meta prompting Quest customers to verify their age so it may present teenagers and preteens with applicable experiences.

The brand new initiative will roll out later this 12 months and can solely be accessible to establishments with college students 13 years previous and up. Meta mentioned it’ll launch it first within the 20 markets the place it already helps Quest for Enterprise, Meta’s workplace-focused $14.99/month subscription. That checklist contains the U.S., Canada, the UK and a number of other different English-speaking markets, together with Japan and far of western Europe.

There are a selection of firms already out there exploring the concept of VR within the classroom, with names like Immersion VR, ClassVR and ArborVR, to not point out the likes of Microsoft, which has been pushing its HoloLens as an academic software for some time now.

It’s not clear how ubiquitous VR use is in faculties: one supplier, ClassVR, claims that 40,000 lecture rooms worldwide are utilizing its merchandise.

However all the identical, there stay hurdles to mass market utilization. It’s not clear, for instance, whether or not strapping a headset to somebody’s face is essentially a assist in a reside, instructional setting, contemplating a few of the analysis round younger folks already getting an excessive amount of display time as it’s.

And one other large query mark will relate to the price of shopping for headsets (Quest 3, the most recent headset, begins at round $500 apiece for fundamental fashions), shopping for apps, after which subsequently supporting all of that infrastructure. Meta mentioned that it has already donated Quest headsets to fifteen universities within the U.S., however it’s not clear how far it’ll go to subsidize development long run.