Social media giant Facebook saw an 80 per cent increase in its non-advertising revenue for its most recent financial quarter.

Speaking to investors – as reported by Seeking Alpha – CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that this growth was driven by sales of its Oculus virtual reality division. The division brought in $297m for the three months ending March 31st, 2020.

The exec also said that Oculus Quest (pictured) – the wireless virtual reality headset that the company released in May 2019 – had "surpassed our expectations." Zuckerberg said that he wished he could make more of the hardware during this period as he says that during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic lockdown that it would be a way of connecting with people.

"I wish we can make more of them faster during this period," he said.

"I do think that it's one of those areas where as people can't go out into the world as much, the ability to have technology that allows us to be physically present or feel present even when we can be physically together, whether that's Quest or Portal or any of the software that we're building around video presence that stuff is certainly seen especially large spikes in usage and it's possible that this brings accelerate some of the trends around adoption of things like virtual or augmented reality. But I'm not sure what will happen there long-term? But in the near term, I'm quite pleased with how Quest is doing and I wish we could make more of them."

VR headsets are seeing something of a boom at the moment. Research firm SuperData reported that Valve's Index hardware sold 149,000 copies in 2019. The company also says that the Oculus Quest shifted 317,000 units in Q4 2019.