Meta will open physical metaverse-themed store in San Francisco Bay Area

Social media giant Facebook's parent company, Meta, will be opening a retail store in the San Francisco Peninsula offering hardware for the virtual reality space.

In a Monday announcement, Meta said it would be opening a retail store in Burlingame, California on May 9 aimed at providing interactive demos for the company’s hardware products, including virtual reality headsets, video communications displays and smart glasses. The store, which will be located on  Meta's Burlingame campus — its headquarters is in Menlo Park — will feature a wall-to-wall curved LED screen that displays what users see using Meta headsets.

“The Meta Store is going to help people make that connection to how our products can be the gateway to the Metaverse in the future,” said Martin Gilliard, the store head. “We’re not selling the Metaverse in our store, but hopefully people will come in and walk out knowing a little bit more about how our products will help connect them to it.”

Facebook rebranded to Meta in October 2021, saying at the time that its focus was expanding beyond social media and later announcing its Metaverse vision for connecting online social experiences and the physical world. Though tech giants including Apple have brick and mortar stores across the world, Facebook’s roughly 2.9 billion users have not had the opportunity to enter a company retail store since the company was founded in 2004. 

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In the Metaverse, however, many firms are scooping up virtual properties, with electronics giant Samsung launching a metaverse store in the blockchain-powered world Decentraland in January. Reports have also suggested that major retailers like Walmart may also be preparing to go Meta.