As of April 8 2024, the company operating virtual reality immersive collaboration platform provider Glue declared bankruptcy under a decision by the District Court of Helsinki.
The operating firm is selling assets, including the Glue platform. Unless a new company purchases the platform and continues its operation, Glue may shut down for good – “despite our best efforts to prevent this outcome, we were unable to find a timely solution,” the firm noted.
Glue states that across the coming two weeks, the firm is exploring options to secure the platform’s future. However, if Glue does not find a suitable operating firm, in that case, the platform will close after those two weeks or earlier, depending on whether “the service providers for the company’s servers decide to shut the servers down or deny access due to unpaid invoices.”
The Glue platform is currently operating under its 2.0 version, which enables users to engage with expected remote meeting tools, such as virtual spaces, customisable assets, and presentation tools. Moreover, the service saw adoption from firms like T-Mobile, a client that notably championed its success with the service.
A Trend of Virtual Meeting Platforms Shutting Down?
The news of Glue’s potential closure comes following the decrease in virtual meeting spaces from major XR firms, such as Microsoft, Mozilla, and Meta.
Most recently, Meta removed several features from its virtual meeting room tool Horizon: Workrooms in a proclaimed effort to provide a “more streamlined and reliable experience.” At the same time, Meta optimised the platform’s user experience.
As of March 30, Meta removed Horizon Workrooms features, including functions such as interactive whiteboards, custom posters logos/environments/layouts, chat files/links, and tracked keyboards. Moreover, Meta has also removed all user data related to these features. This is perhaps a bid to streamline the service as productivity solutions move towards a spatial computing vision.
Mozilla has announced it will shut down Hubs, which includes Hubs Demo Server, Managed Subscription, and community resource, due to “organisation-wide restructuring.”
Hubs will be shut down on May 31, 2024, with new subscription creations being disabled on March 1. A new tool to download data was made available on April 1, 2024, for demo users and subscribers. A blog post by the Mozilla Hubs Team reassured users that its priority was to support them during this transition – “Hubs is one of the products impacted, and it will be shut down later this year.”
The decision to shut down Hubs is a sudden reversal of their expansion plan, which was declared in July 2020, to increase the platform’s regional coverage and attract more education and enterprise end-users.
In March last year, Microsoft shut down its AltSpace platform. Microsoft bought the service in 2017, following its debut in May 2015. The “Metaverse” service gained popularity across the years, although following a steep rise in competition, Microsoft chose to close the service on March 10, 2023.
Following the closure, Microsoft transferred many of its remaining staff and resources to Microsoft’s development of Mesh. In its closing statements, the transferred Altspace VR team explained that they will contribute to creating a Mesh platform that provides the “widest opportunity to all involved, including creators, partners and customers.”
Over nearly one year, four major virtual meeting solutions providers restructured or closed doors in one way or another. Could this be a thinning and rethinking of the XR segment now the pandemic remote working boom has settled? Or will the curve uptick as devices gain further ubiquity?
