Meta Company

» see metavision.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Meron Gribetz started the work as a student at Columbia and founded the company in late 2012. The first developer kit came off a Kickstarter in March 2013. Nobody outside the field paid much attention until the second headset, and then for about eighteen months you could not discuss augmented reality in public without somebody saying Meta.

The Meta 2 was a tethered visor with a ninety degree field of view and a 2560 by 1440 display, tracking your hands through a front-facing camera, and it was sold as a development kit rather than a consumer product. It shipped in December 2016 at 1,495 dollars. By August 2018 it was discounted to 949 dollars, which in hardware is the sound a company makes when it is clearing a warehouse. Dell had picked it up as the first major reseller at the start of that year, and by the following January there was no trace of it anywhere on Dell's site.

My own work is computer vision, on the drone side rather than the headset side, which makes the tracking and calibration half of this story familiar in a way most graves here are not. The product itself never came near me. A fifteen hundred dollar tethered dev kit in 2017 was a thing you read release notes about from Ankara and did not order.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the ted talk ~

Gribetz unveiled the Meta 2 on the TED stage in early 2016 and the talk is still up. Very little of it is about the headset. He told the audience that humanity was about to put a layer of digital information over the physical world, and that the interface metaphors inherited from desktops and phones were holding everyone back. As a neuroscientist, he said, he had always wanted to build the iOS of the mind. This would replace phones before long. Everyone at his company, he promised, would stop using conventional computers and work entirely inside the Meta 2.

The context makes the scale of the claim clearer. Magic Leap, which had not shown anybody a headset at all, had raised close to 800 million dollars by that point and would raise another 1.5 billion. Meta was in the middle of its Series B when Gribetz gave that talk, and its total funding stood at 73 million. It was making promises at Magic Leap volume on under a tenth of the money.

~ the filing that said it out loud ~

The Series B closed in June 2016, fifty million dollars led by Lenovo with Horizons Ventures behind it. The money after that was supposed to come from China, and in September 2018 it did not. A 20 million dollar round failed to close and the company furloughed most of its workforce. The chief revenue officer left. The person who had been the company's public face before that was already on an unexplained leave of absence that nobody ever updated. By late 2018 metavision.com had been reduced to a holding page on a bare cloud IP address saying a new website was coming soon, with a link to the SDK and an email address for support.

What forced the admission was a patent suit. Genedics LLC had sued in Delaware in 2018, reported that August, over interface patents covering image manipulation in three-dimensional space. Meta tried to move the case to California and was refused. In November its lawyers asked to withdraw. Judge Christopher Burke let them go and ordered the company to find new counsel, and then nothing happened for two months.

On 9 January 2019 the plaintiff's attorney filed a status request and attached the answer he had finally received. It is four sentences from chief financial officer John Sines, addressed to the judge. Settlement talks had failed. The company's lender had exercised its remedies as first priority secured lender, foreclosed, and sold all assets to a third party in a UCC foreclosure sale at a value below the outstanding loan amount. Meta Company was insolvent and did not have the resources to hire a lawyer or to make a settlement offer. That is the death certificate, and it exists because a court asked a question that nobody else had the standing to ask.

~ the doctrine outlived the company ~

The assets went to a buyer Gribetz would not name, who turned out to have registered a company called Meta View Inc at the end of 2018 and taken the trademarks. Gribetz told Variety that week that the assets had a future, which was the most he could say. Within two months metavision.com was back up, bigger than before, serving the SDK and the full set of spatial interface guidelines the company had written: minimize abstractions, you are the OS, touch to see, the holographic campfire, public by default. The design doctrine stayed online after the device stopped having a manufacturer.

metavision.com answered with a redirect as late as 2020. It does not answer now. In October 2021 a social network in Menlo Park announced it was renaming itself Meta, and nobody in Silicon Valley was left to object, which is the part everybody gets backwards. This company was called Meta first, for six years, and was dead almost three years before the name became famous for something else.

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