Lofelt announced on its website “Lofelt is now embarking on a new adventure, and we will sunset our products on July 7th, 2022”, this was a bit cryptic and left us wondering what is happening here. WSJ announced that Meta has acquired Lofelt, for an undisclosed sum. Now, did Meta purchase Lofelt after it had decided to cease trading or did it cause Lofelt to cease trading, I am not sure yet.
What this acquisition demonstrates again is that haptics is a key technology for VR, and that Meta has deep pockets and continues to buy up technology companies that will help it complete its ambitions for the Metaverse.
For those interested in learning a bit more about Lofelt, there is still a chance to view the blog on Medium. This demonstrates the focus on gaming, which fits snugly with Meta’s other recent games studio acquisitions. Right now, VR/Metaverse is pretty much all about gaming, I think this will remain the case for many years to come and I’m sure more acquisitions will happen over the next few years.
It reminds me of what happened in the early years of the voice assistant market, where many smaller, pioneering companies were swallowed up by the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google and Nuance in a race to be the leading voice technology company. While Meta is arguably currently leading the race, I am sure there will be 2 or 3 other large organisations that will start to compete to provide Metaverse platforms. Interesting times.
