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Comment by jjulius | Hacker News Reader

>IMO the hardware simply isn't good enough for the mass market yet.

>I think there might be some other factors at play, too. Throwing on a VR headset feels a lot more antisocial than watching TV or tinkering on your phone in the living room because you're wearing a giant headset that separates you from the real world. Even if the hardware does get really good, I'm not entirely sure how easy it is for manufacturers to convince families that headsets are a good purchase.

Forgive my ignorance, this is a genuine question.

Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse? I see this massive push from the tech industry, a lot of public disinterest, and companies are still insisting that we want this. Do we have public polls that confirm people do crave the metaverse to the extent that tech wants us to? What is making them so confident beyond just hope?

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Good question.

I don’t have a poll but three observations.

1) People’s tastes vary. But millions of units have sold so people are open to it.

2) My non-techy 60+ year old aunt tried my Quest and kept raving about it and bought one.

3) It has potential to be more immersive. Having messed around with Quest, there are demos of things that are step functions of experience beyond what you get with a TV experience: the eye opener for me was front row seat in a small venue with your favorite band, up close and personal. When the video+3d resolution get better, it will get way more compelling.

Entertainment is all about feelings. An immersive experience provides even more ability for evoking them. People do seem to value more-immersive where possible if you look at the history of TV+movies… if the distractions can be eliminated.

But if the packaging tells you not to let people under 13 years to use it (because their eyesight is still developing?) (and I love the honesty), it’s fair to say the tech isn’t fully there and you aren’t going to capture the next generation of kids with spare time on their hands, among many other factors.

There is also not a lot of free compelling content on Quest unlike the internet; rather they are very geared towards selling you $20 apps in their store. I respect the need to monetize but there is also a fair bit of learning still needed on marketing and business model side for both the platform and apps to drive me to keep opening the wallet. I felt like I explored most of the free content and apps in under 10 hours. Value for money just wasn’t there for me.

I did feel like the tech was “good enough” that this tech would get there eventually. That is a key threshold to cross and imho has been crossed. But I am also reminded of my old (pre-iPhone-eta) WindowsCE mobile phone with stylus and web browser in my pocket. There was value there… but it was also greatly mitigated by being cumbersome in various ways.

> 1) People’s tastes vary. But millions of units have sold so people are open to it.

Is this an indication that people want the Metaverse, specifically, or are open to VR in general?

I am not much of a gamer, and probably the last person who would ever be interested in a VR headset. But I can see the appeal of VR games. I can't, for the life of me, see the appeal of "the Metaverse."

I see "the metaverse" as the liminal space between actual VR apps (games, business, whatever). If you're between rounds of a VR game you don't want to remove the helmet while waiting and chatting so you'll hang out in a VR-enabled lobby where you see each other in your in-game outfits. Eventually enough games will have VR lobbies that you'll hang out with people in other games' outfits as you all wait for your game to start.

Ditto business. If you're in VR because you're reviewing architectural renderings or whatever, you'll probably keep the helmet on for a few minutes between meetings and as such, seeing your coworkers come out of other virtual meeting rooms and hang around at a virtual water cooler gives you a bit of that hallway conversation that you're now missing, and provides a continuity of experience.

None of this is where the money is though, at least not now. You're still playing a game, or using business software, and that's what you pay for - not the lobby. That's why, I think, Meta and stuff seems so silly. They seem to expect that you're going to want to use it for its own sake, as opposed to it being equivalent to the Facebook UI - something you use to get the real value, not the value itself.

This is also a great question. Beyond that, of the millions of units sold, I'd be curious to know how many of those are upgrades from the same early adopters vs first-time buyers. Also, what has the trajectory of new user adoption looked like?

There's no eyesight risk for children; the 13 year old restriction is for compliance with childrens' online privacy and marketing legal restrictions.

> Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse?

To answer that, we first need a good answer to the question: "What the hell is the 'Metaverse' supposed to be?"

Because as long as that isn't answered, the question reads: "Do people, on the whole, even want another corporate buzzword?", and I think we all know the answer to that one.

>Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse?

My impression -

Do people want magical alternative worlds they can hang out in? Yeah, video gaming is huge, bigger than movies.

Do people want to interact with those with a VR thing stuck on their head? No, not on the whole - normal screens are fine.

People don't want the metaverse for themselves, but Meta's customers have never been its users.

What people (the customers) want is a dashboard that lets them dispatch memes to other people (the users). Meta already sells that. But they want those memes to affect the users' behavior, and Meta is betting that they can turn a stream of user biometrics (collected by the headset) into a way to better tune the meme-delivery-to-desired-behavior pipeline.

Or at least that's what they've convinced the decision makers. It's probably a long way off from working and instead that narrative is just being used to justify building something sci-fi.

> Do people, on the whole, even want the metaverse?

My take?

As a general question, no, they don't. And they won't.

However, they may want it for niche applications. Games would be the big one, but also perhaps certain industrial applications and other business functions. Although the business uses are probably better served with just AR instead of a whole "metaverse" (depending on your definition of "metaverse").

Which brings up the definitional problem. We have the metaverse and people love it -- we just call it the internet. So I'm assuming that when people say "metaverse", what they really mean is "VR worlds".

0% interest rates make companies throw money at useless products looking for returns because there wasn't any better use for the money. It's been like that for 5+ years, but this whole NFT/Bitcoin/Metaverse/AI meme series is the peak.

Here's to hoping that these higher interest rates make companies make actually useful and profitable products instead of a bunch of meme products.

I do anyway. I find the entire concept oddly compelling. To fabricate a completely immersive online world is just fascinating to me. I would love to see this work someday.

Unfortunately, today I can't even use VR for more than a few minutes before I'm ready to vomit and my eyes feel like they're being pulled out of my head.

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