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To offer an additional perspective:

A far less monetized and more user content focused version of "the Metaverse" already exists: VRChat. It's been around since before Covid and it is still around. Granted, yes, it is still mostly a niche hobby for some very dedicated people, not all of whom even use VR, but it exists. I think the people who would have been interested in Meta's product looked at it and thought "But we already have a less crappy version of this that's not tied to a questionable company." Especially since Meta's handling of Oculus has been far from great (i.e. requiring a Facebook/Meta account just to use any headset, as opposed to the separate account like before).

But as I said, it's still fairly niche and mostly serves as an escape for people. I think slapping the whole "buy in-world items with crypto" thing on top of that just made the target group even smaller than before. It just felt like jumping onto any tech buzz words to broaden appeal, when it actually caused the opposite. For all the data they're supposed to have, that was poor decision making imo.

The data I'm looking at makes the Facebook decision a little more sensical.

Yes there was a Big Spike in VR interest around Oculus, and most of the people who bought one have it sitting in a corner collecting dust...

But a significant subset of people continued to use it, and their usage is steadily growing. There are huge numbers of people willing to pay $500 -$2k, on each new device that comes out, just to "see if its ready".

There are tons of people who work from home on a couple monitors, who WANT to have a VR work setup that gives them screens the size of walls. Obviously the comfort, battery, and visual performance is not there yet, but most people have a feeling that would could just be a generation or two away from it.

I would guess that more than 50% of hacker news readers over 40 years old had an MP3 player BEFORE the iPod. They were all garbage and completely replaced when the iPod came out, but for the 2-3 years before the iPod, all the early adopters new something like that was coming and they were hungry for it.

I feel that's exactly where VR is.

> who WANT to have a VR work setup that gives them screens the size of walls. I saw that in the tech demo last year and would agree with that sentiment. Yet I wouldn't want to wear headset for a full day to achieve that.

> They were all garbage

No, they weren't. There were excellent ones. What they lacked was enough storage to carry your entire music library with you -- that was the problem the iPod addressed.

But in terms of playing music, the iPod was not exceptional.

All the Oculus hype was based on the promise of a $300 headset. The amount of people that are willing to pay $500-$2k is rather tiny (<< 1 million), especially with a near complete lack of AAA game content.

Meanwhile the VR-as-monitor replacement fails due to the low resolution. VR headsets by design waste a ton of resolution to get a larger FOV. That's good for immersion and gaming, but renders desktop use impossible. It's possible to build headsets with a small FOV and high resolution, such as what Nreal is doing, but that's not something Meta is focusing on. Worse yet, they kind of pretended that the QuestPro was ready for that use case, but it's not even close.

I do agree that there is potential in VR, but Meta has been focusing on all the wrong things. They were far more concerned with gaining total control over the space then they are were about making VR actually worth having. Nobody is looking at Horizon World and goes "I wanna have that", it not only looks terrible compared to stuff we have outside of VR, it even looks terrible compared to all the non-Meta stuff we have in VR.

VR is kind of a gimmick, but AR will, 100%, be the next frontier of human-computer interaction. It sparks the imagination in an extremely tangible way.

Having built mobile-based AR apps, I realized that I see more value in projected AR over screen-based AR (Glasses).

With the obvious example being : parking instructions while driving a car

Wearing tech that can project shit over people's eyes while driving should be illegal until it's proven to be safe with year(s) of track record.

Depends on whether it's the kind that's just glasses when turned off, or the kind that's just a VR headset with a camera on the front.

This will be a good reason for more people to use public transport!

But IMO, attitudes like "it sparks the imagination" is why VR failed.

FB succeeded because it was in the right place at the right time. Sure, it positioned itself cleverly, but the moment in history was ripe for a social media company.

Things don't just succeed because they spark the imagination or because you work really hard at them: they succeed because all the factors beyond your control are aligned, too.

AR clearly has more use cases than VR, but AR will also remain a niche technology. It just has more applicable niches.

Well Apple are going pretty heavy into VR/AR with there product likely launching this year, so it's not just Meta that got caught up in that wave, a few years ago that was where a lot of people thought the future was, so that is where both Facebook and Apple seemed to put a lot of investment.

It's not done yet. AI is the current buzz because we are starting to see some great products and uses for it, we have yet to see that with VR/AR but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. It's still early, I am not a fan of the 'metaverse' idea, but VR/AR still has a lot left to give.

I think the discussion around VR/AR sometimes misses the forest for the trees. Yeah, existing products are mostly sucky/very niche, and the existing direction for the entire sub-industry seems very unlikely to break into the mainstream.

But that's not to say it's not possible for a mainstream-successful iteration of the idea to exist. My personal feeling is that there is a viable path to mainstream success, though it's far from guaranteed that a player succeeds in taking said path.

The real question IMO isn't "can VR/AR be made mainstream successful" (this is largely unknowable until someone does it), the question is "can FB be the company that makes VR/AR mainstream successful".

And IMO the answer has always been no. If there is viability in the entire subfield I think Meta is poorly positioned to be the tip of the spear.

Its fundamental business model works against the interests of good products in this field (stuff every virtual surface full of ads! Inescapable eyeball tracking for MAXIMUM CONVERSION ATTRIBUTION!!!1one) - one can make a (good) argument about the implications of Meta's VR play with the interests of humanity, but I don't think we even need to get that deep. Their business model fundamentally is at odds with creating compelling products in this arena. So much of their product strategy seems to be stuck in the hole of "what is good for Meta" instead of "what is good for users".

And then there's seemingly the perennial issue of FB not being able to ooze any kind of desirability or cultural cachet, which is deeply necessary for any of this to reach the mainstream in a big way. Everything it touches, even before the VR/AR pivot, is like an even more corporate and dead-eyed version of EPCOT.

Agreed; i would claim: If video chats/conferencing are XX% (95%) of a real-life conversation and a "metaverse" product can bring that up to XX%+N% (99%) then people will pay for it. If the cost is right it'll become mainstream. If the cost is too high it'll probably be a business or niche tool. Once that tech exists other products will become possible too.

I don't personally see what's controversial with that claim and bet. Separately one can argue if the current tech is anywhere near good enough to achieve the N% gains but the common thread of VR/AR/metaverse as being a useless product forever is a textbook example of missing the forest through the trees.

I agree, if Meta had focused on building an open platform and ecosystem that people could freely experiment with, they might have gotten somewhere. It certainly wouldn't have been as dead on arrival. But of course, that's not the kind of company Meta is. They want everyone to pile back onto facebook where they can control and monetize every aspect, except a cartoonish 3D version of it.

I already spend 8+ hours a day in front of a large screen. If the tech is good enough that I can use it 8 hours without discomfort/side effects and get huge virtual screens - me and millions of professionals are sold.

And when I have it for work the play becomes more realistic.

So for me that's the killer feature of VR - portable monitor replacement - you can take it anywhere, pop it on and you're instantly in your virtual office. This would be worth 1000s $ if it "just worked" like Apple products do.

Apple and Microsoft are the only tech players I could see pulling this off because of the OS integration required. And Microsoft failed with Hololens.

Very true. I think many people don't realize how uncomfortable phone screens are because they are just used to it and love the portability.

The day I tried HoloLens I quickly saw there is much more potential in that tech than many thing.

A 360deg screen that you can take anywhere with you and that can give you a true field of depth / 3d view. When the devices will perform well enough and be portable enough, this will become huge.

But our industry is very fad-driven, and it's common that when one big company starts pouring money into a thing, others do as well. It's usually FOMO rather than some sort of well-considered thing.

> They don't want VR in their life. People want more REALITY in their life, not less.

For myself, I 100% agree.

Tired: Metaverse; Wired: Protoverse.

There are some people who legitimately love VR games like VRChat. I am not one of them, but I have talked to a few. At the time that Facebook made it's initial investments into that space starting in 2014 there was at least some possibility that those people were the early adopters of a technology that would disrupt the social media and entertainment industries. Of course that turned out to be wrong (or at least too early) but at the time it wasn't completely implausible. Large enterprises sometimes have to invest in long shots as a risk mitigation strategy.

VR itself is great for immersive gaming and other similar experiences (e.g. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1318030/Fractal_Alchemist...). And some of those can be social, as well.

But that is all orthogonal to the "metaverse" as Meta envisions it, and I really don't see the utility of that.

> People want more REALITY in their life, not less.

Agree with most of what you said. But my take is, people would LOVE virtual reality if it were done well enough. We just don't seem to have the technical capability to pull it off well enough yet. Uncanny valley and all that.

Yes exactly. ChatGPT is exciting because it actually works, not because it’s the first AI chat program. If Microsoft had pivoted to it even 5 years ago they’d be a laughingstock like Meta.

VR currently works as good as ChatGPT.

or ChatGPT works as poorly as VR.

Not for me it doesn’t. I use ChatGPT all the time in my work and it saves me a lot of time. With a couple of exceptions I haven’t found much compelling in VR and can’t stand to do it more than 60 minutes at a stretch.

What does uncanny valley has to do with VR?

What Meta has been pushing as Metaverse is pretty big on human-like avatars.

But what does it has to do with VR in general? You don't have to use any of Meta social apps to use VR.

It have to do with VR because VR is attempting to replicate reality. If you do that almost, but not quite, perfectly then you're in the uncanny valley. It doesn't have to be about portraying people.

Current VR can't even approach realism -- which keeps it out of the uncanny valley.

However, if the technology improves to the point where the graphics approach realistic, the uncanny valley will become a real problem.