We already have VR. Incrementally, maybe there will be some sort of popular VR chat down the road, but it's just too expensive at this point for mass adoption. The distance between getting a Twitter account and hopping on the Metaverse is over $500.
The problem in every hype cycle of VR is never price. It's strapping a chunk of plastic to your head and blocking out the real world.
I see something like Google Project Starline as being a better bet for "mass adoption" in the application space that meta is aiming for.
I'd love to see a "Minority Report"-like interface in the form of Starline + Kinect. Oh, and with electronic ink to save my eyes. Thank you, future.
The idea of putting on a headset and "experiencing" a "chat" is a downright Lovecraftian dystopia that I want no part of - and I work in tech. Maybe it's the proximity to hardware that makes me so hostile to the idea, but I cannot for the life of me imagine doing that voluntarily. And thus I have to imagine that it wouldn't be voluntary if it becomes mainstream. "Everyone needs a facebook" becomes "everyone needs an Oculus" and so on. That it's $500 is a minor aspect of this.
> The idea of putting on a headset and "experiencing" a "chat" is a downright Lovecraftian dystopia
For the record, I fully believe that to be accurate for headsets. But how about fully immersive, 270°-by-270° viewport VR helmets? I've just come back from a beach holiday, and the thing that struck me was how many children were using snorkeling helmets. Not snorkels and goggles, but full-on helmets with a builtin snorkel jutting out on top. If kids can find such devices comfortable for making their swimming and light diving experience easier, then from a form factor point of view, a VR device going the same route might not be an entirely impossible thing.
The tech sure isn't there yet. And from a latency point of view, may never[0] become a reality. But a device around one's head appears not to be unthinkable.
0: I don't know how many milliseconds of visual latency a human brain can tolerate before breaking the immersion and/or giving the user a headache, but I suspect it's in single digits. Getting to those kinds of refresh rates, the display bandwidth demands would be insane. Possibly beyond what's physically possible.