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Comment by 6nf | Hacker News Reader

>I see little evidence for it.

Besides the fact that only 50 people are in the Metaverse right now? Literally nobody is using VR for meetings and work and stuff. Nobody likes being cut off from all real human interactions. At least with a video call I can see your face and you can see mine. VR? it's just voice chat with a stupid headset.

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Absolutely. After covid, people are craving physical contact and outdoor activities. Travel and tourism is trending up. This idea that people want to put on a headset and stay indoors, netflix and chill or whatever is not happening. Maybe the niche hackernews/reddit crowd might prefer to avoid social contact and put on a VR headset, but I'm not seeing that in the local restaurants, bars, shopping malls, concerts, and theatres. They are crowded.

VR isn't just meta. There's 20k people in the Steam version of VRChat at the time of this comment.

These are all problems that people are working on. There is no reason they cannot be solved.

>> Nobody likes being cut off from all real human interactions.

> There is no reason they cannot be solved.

Explain?

The goal is not to replace human interaction, it is to replace phone calls and video chat. To make the experience better than those things is not an insurmountable task.

A few 10s of billions of dollars along with a bunch of super smart people haven't made much of a dent, so I don't think vague assurances are going to cut it. Nobody can predict what technology will be like in a few decades, but I don't see any reason to be particularly bullish on VR. At this rate, even if it does happen at some point, Meta likely won't be around to see it.

They've literally made massive progress inside of 5 years. I don't know that we're watching the same space.

The goal is for VR to become a dominant platform and their progress has been far from massive. Some technical advancements along the way are nice, but won't matter without large numbers of users.

How many people visit the metaverse multiple times per day?

What percent of the population spends hours per day in a VR headset?

The answer to those questions needs to be much better than "miniscule" for this project to be any sort of success.

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