Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse will require tech no one knows how to build
protocol.com
protocol.com
The problems with VR revolve more around the real potential for VR being highly intense experiences which you just can’t do for 8 hours a day like you can reading, watching TV, surfing the web, futzing with apps, playing video games, etc.
It is easy to dismiss the claims of people violating other people’s personal space in Horizon Worlds as people being over sensitive but actually you can evoke very strong feelings with proxemics in VR. If a character gets too close to you or stays uncomfortably far away it can make you feel chills up and down your spine particularly if these are contrasted. (I think of how I felt in the real world when somebody I’d flirted with the other day came close enough to to feel their body heat the next day.)
Small businesses can use Facebook effectively to reach their customers but doing the same with VR might be a lot more expensive. Things like Horizon Worlds might be too close to real life to really seem like an escape. People mock the low quality graphics but the real problem is an absolute lack of story. It is the artistic and business problems that could keep VR niche.
As for AR there is a real problem with the glasses, Karl Guttag’s blog has gone into great detail how difficult of a problem it is to overlay images on the physical world even if cost and size and looks aren’t an issue. AR has some great applications such as overlaying construction plans over the thing being constructed but whether anything will justify the cost to the consumer is something else.
It's definitely fun to try for half an hour though. On the other hand I could realistically see some potential if they made the fully immersive experience a bit less intense, e.g. by providing an app that you can navigate with mouse and keyboard on a normal screen.
Other than that many problems are solvable, also there are surely corner-cases where fully immersive experiences make sense (product demos for instance). But considering the amount of problems that already exist with legacy social networks, the actual Metaverse might come from a new startup or be post-poned another time.
My pets become annoying. My wife becomes annoying. Whole rooms become empty VR spaces.
VR's immersion is too separate from the real world. Unlike a phone, tv, or controller, you cannot just look away. It's a 30 second setup/tear down cycle just to check a notification on your phone or handle a dog walking by looking for a pet.
Meta will never be the next big thing.
Well, he did.
Mark isn’t particularly well suited to understand the impact of VR/AR on an aging Western population. In the best case scenario, it lets people be young again, which could be a blockbuster until the underlying cultural norms of GenX and the Boomers (who are certain to find it repulsive) drop it like the Pet Rock.
Maybe some application in markets where people can barely afford to strap cellphones to their foreheads with Cardboard, or perhaps among the Millennials, tho that is a very different product than Facebook is today.