Fuzzy concept
One of the biggest issues is Disney never quite defined what its metaverse strategy was. Former CEO Chapek vaguely discussed uniting Disney’s real-life properties with virtual reality. “We’ll be able to connect the physical and digital worlds even more closely,” Chapek said during a 2021 earnings call, referring to the metaverse initiative.
Disney declined to comment for this story. Bob Iger returned as CEO, where he had been the leader from 2005 to 2020, in November. Iger has identified content, technology and new markets as the three pillars for Disney. This week, Disney started a round of layoffs that will affect 7,000 workers, about 3% of the staff, which included an estimated 50 people on its metaverse business.
Montse Cebrian, a senior technical program manager on Disney’s “next generation storytelling” team, posted on LinkedIn this week: “OK, I’ll cut to the chase: Yes, the secret (and super amazing) project I was working on at Disney has been shut down.”
The changes don’t mean Disney is out of the technology game, of course. Disney is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. The company is known for visual graphics, animatronics, movie making and internet services. Earlier this month, Josh D’Amaro, chairman of experiences and products at Disney Parks, was at SXSW in Austin, Texas, the tech and media festival, where he did a presentation about robots and motion capture.
Read more: The latest SXSW news
Niantic, the developer of Pokémon Go, is an example of a tech company that has spun popular IP into an augmented reality world. Since 2016, Pokémon Go fans have been on treasure hunts in real life to capture the digital characters made famous as a Nintendo game in the 1990s.
“It’s long been our stance that we need to think about the next generation of technology and connection as more than just virtual worlds,” said Caitlin Lacey, Niantic’s senior director, product marketing, AR developer platform, in an email to Ad Age. “This narrow view does a disservice to the many technologies—augmented reality, virtual reality, Web3, AI, etc.—that are already playing significant roles in strategies that blend and connect the physical and digital worlds.”
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