Industry News
Meta Announces Digital Designer Clothing Store for Avatars in the Metaverse
Meta Inc. CEO (formerly Facebook) Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of a designer clothing store for digital avatars called the “Meta Avatars Store.”
Zuckerberg made the announcement on Instagram live along with Instagram’s vice president of fashion partnerships Eva Chen. An avatar in the metaverse is more than just a user-created face.
It is your identity. Every avatar is unique with limitless possibilities. Avatars have humanoid features such as moveable limbs, upper and lower torsos, and a face capable of expression. Similar to the real world, you can buy clothes for your avatars as well. These digital clothing are essential and can be bought and sold on a marketplace.
“We’re launching our Avatars Store on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger so you can buy digital clothes to style your avatar. Digital goods will be an important way to express yourself in the metaverse and a big driver of the creative economy. I’m excited to add more brands and bring this to VR soon too,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Facebook.
According to Zuckerberg, the store will offer digital outfits from brands such as Balenciaga, Prada, and Thom Browne, more brands will be added soon. The store will be rolled out next week. Currently, the pricing of digital clothing has not been revealed yet. However, free clothing for digital avatars will continue to remain available.
A report by TechCrunch said that the Meta Avatars Store will start rolling out next week in the United States, Canada, Thailand, and Mexico.
This comes weeks after Meta introduced new updated 3D Avatars across Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram, allowing users in the country to create 3D Avatars of themselves, in a push towards its ambition of being a metaverse platform. Your 3D Avatar is a cartoon version of yourself that is supposed to capture how you look in a virtual setting. These 3D Avatars have already been rolled out to many other countries and are now being made available in India.
Once you create an Avatar on Facebook, you can use it on Facebook, the Messenger App, Instagram Stories and DMs, and the Meta Quest headset.