Sony Group Corp. is projected to sell fewer than 300,000 PlayStation VR2 headsets in its first weeks on the market, a slow start for company efforts to take a leading role in development of the metaverse. 

The headset is a foundational piece of Sony’s strategy to build a metaverse where people can do far more than play video games. But the conceptual 3D virtual environments that prompted Mark Zuckerberg to rename his company Meta Platforms Inc. have yet to repay the industry’s heavy investments in hardware and software.