Zuckerberg
Goal
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg explained how his company is digging deeper and deeper into the black mines of the metaverse, trying to mine gold.
That led to the reveal of a $1,500 Oculus Pro headset, as much as the PS5, Xbox Series X, and Quest 2 combined, and some updates to the look of avatars and integration with Microsoft’s enterprise products.
When your most significant announcement is the fact that after years and years of investment, you’re about to release virtual characters with legs, something has gone wrong.
The whole problem with Mark Zuckerberg’s fascination with the metaverse is that he’s trying to force a sci-fi reality that happens long before the rest of society wants or needs it to actually exist. Their version of an AR/VR-based metaverse remains niche, not something to focus a trillion-dollar company on. And considering the trillion dollar company in question, which has spent the last decade rendering Facebook and Instagram nearly unusable, this company being entrusted with this supposed key part of the future is not something in which no one has much faith.
Legs
Goal
The main problem with Mark’s metaverse is that it is a solution in search of dozens of problems.
It’s an alternative place to play some interesting VR-based video games, but its total collection is a drop in the bucket compared to the larger gaming industry, which churns out new and engaging experiences monthly and has built huge communities in line shared for decades, like the type that Meta says it wants to cultivate. There was once the idea that virtual reality was the next “leap” in gaming beyond consoles and PCs, but that vision hasn’t materialized, and after all these years, the reality market virtual is still fractional compared to the larger whole. PlayStation, with PSVR, treats it as an add-on to a larger ensemble. Meta sees it as the whole pie, even if he claims he doesn’t.
But gaming almost feels like a minuscule focus for Horizon compared to the time it spent extolling the virtues of VR-based business integration. They had Accenture come in and talk about their virtual office they made out of little paper doll avatars, and Satya Nadella showed up to talk about the exciting integration of… Microsoft Office and Teams into the Metaverse. Even here, it is difficult to understand what is being proposed as a revolutionary transformation of how business is done. Meta is trying to replicate the concept of being together in a room for a meeting, something most people try to avoid at baseline, and offering something that doesn’t feel any more coherent than a normal meeting from Zoom or Teams, which isn’t exciting either. at baseline. This whole concept is based on the idea that you could give up to five virtuals to a virtual co-worker in the metaverse, a nice party trick (albeit with these avatars, an awkward one), but something to sink billions of dollars research that follows? And which companies use this technology regularly with a straight face?
accent
Goal
Finally, Mark Zuckerberg has gone a little crazy after too many people made fun of his Mii-like Horizon avatar, which he kept sharing screenshots of, and now in search of more beautiful virtual reality avatars he has now created something that’s… a little better than a Sims. character, and slightly worse than a Snapchat overlay filter. He ended the presentation with a photorealistic facial scanning technology with no proposed release date or even a promise that it would come to Horizon.
Of course, if I had unlimited money, maybe I too would spend it on a sci-fi vision of the future that I thought was cool in a bunch of books. But now it’s clear that Zuckerberg’s Meta doesn’t have endless money, and the company is kept afloat by ad revenue controlled by rival tech companies on the social media that everyone hates more and more. Nothing in the metaverse seems remotely profitable, and any attempt to openly monetize it will only make it exponentially worse and make adoption even slower.
We cannot predict where technology will take us in 10, 20 or 50 years. The metaverse may one day exist outside of a weird VR sandbox and 500 blockchain releases in my inbox every day. But that day isn’t now, it isn’t tomorrow, and I don’t know if it will get here before Meta runs out of money or its investors run out of patience.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels, the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.