We imagined a future with flying cars, but today, the notion of wasting energy to overcome gravity, when the normal force from a road could do that for free, seems wasteful in a world struggling to meet its energy needs without emitting more carbon dioxide - and the dream of flying cars seems somewhat antiquated as a result.
We didn't get that future (yet at least), but we got supercomputers in our pockets instead. The point is, trying to predict the future is hard, not because of a lack of imagination, but because technologies don't just have to be "neat and possible", they have to be feasible and compelling enough to justify the economics of commoditization before they can be deployed at scale. They don't exist in a vacuum, they have to make sense in the world in which they show up.
I wonder if the metaverse will turn out similarly to the flying cars - "neat and possible", but not really compelling enough to justify the expense of making it happen at scale? Facebook is making inroads in the commoditization of VR hardware, but does the metaverse itself solve any problem that normal people care about today? Or does it add something compelling that we will turn out to really like? (like how smartphones made the personal computer truly personal, and allows us access to online services at a moment's notice). Maybe there'll be a "killer app" for the metaverse, maybe not.
The point is, it's dangerous for Facebook to assume they know what the end goal is for a new product category, just because they read about it in sci-fi books, and it might lead them to ignore the reality of what market is actually there. OTOH it also means that while FB is busy turning their walled garden 3-dimensional, there might be room for other players to create a related product that more closely aligns with what the world is actually ready for.
Great analysis. People also don't like donning headsets with other people around - it's very much something you do on your own in your own home. We've had nearly 30 years of VR (in some form or another) and if it hasn't caught-on now, I don't think it ever will.
I can’t help but think that press like this just helps play into the dubious idea that “the metaverse” is some exciting new thing and not just this year’s rehashing of the virtual spaces that have popped up over the last couple of decades.
Agreed. I work on a metaverse product, Rec Room, but I’m pretty sure that 99% of my coworkers would classify Rec Room as a game before classifying it as a metaverse. Same with Fortnite. Horizon also seems like a game to me but I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook communicate the phrase “metaverse” to the point where employees have a different view of what they are building.
Metaverse just seems like a fancy way to talk about an MMO game.
If you ask people who've been invited to Horizon, I don't feel like any of them would describe it as a game. It honestly couldn't even be classified as a "virtual world." Or even something as vague as "an experience." It's certainly not a metaverse. Optimistically, maybe it's a product.
I think it's genuinely the only thing I've seen in VR that's been universally condemned by just about everyone who's ever actually touched it.
what's the problem with it? Honest question, it's the first time I've heard about Horizon and the site doesn't seem that different to the VR chat videos that continually pop on youtube or the old second life.
It's incredibly bug-filled. Not in the sense of, "Oh, this is crashy garbage!" like is par for the course in this space of software, but in the sense of "Wow, there are literal functionality-breaking bugs for nearly every user, albeit consistently different ones for each user on the same hardware."
It's hollow. A lack of anything to do may not seem like a big deal, but the only things that people seem to like about it have often been directly cloned from the product tyleo mentioned, and aside from it there's roughly nothing there or worse, downright strange things. It isn't aided by the fact that the design is intentionally more constrained than most of its competitors.
There are a bunch of major issues, but the main thing is that it somehow manages to have nothing going for it in a field where none of the competitors are all that good to begin with.
Second Life, while being a vastly different thing and not particularly comparable, allows open-source clients. That's pretty big!
We didn't get that future (yet at least), but we got supercomputers in our pockets instead. The point is, trying to predict the future is hard, not because of a lack of imagination, but because technologies don't just have to be "neat and possible", they have to be feasible and compelling enough to justify the economics of commoditization before they can be deployed at scale. They don't exist in a vacuum, they have to make sense in the world in which they show up.
I wonder if the metaverse will turn out similarly to the flying cars - "neat and possible", but not really compelling enough to justify the expense of making it happen at scale? Facebook is making inroads in the commoditization of VR hardware, but does the metaverse itself solve any problem that normal people care about today? Or does it add something compelling that we will turn out to really like? (like how smartphones made the personal computer truly personal, and allows us access to online services at a moment's notice). Maybe there'll be a "killer app" for the metaverse, maybe not.
The point is, it's dangerous for Facebook to assume they know what the end goal is for a new product category, just because they read about it in sci-fi books, and it might lead them to ignore the reality of what market is actually there. OTOH it also means that while FB is busy turning their walled garden 3-dimensional, there might be room for other players to create a related product that more closely aligns with what the world is actually ready for.