I'm still not clear on what amazing, useful (profitable) thing Facebook expects to do with "the metaverse". There's incredible potential for games, a vast multiverse of connected worlds with a common architecture. That's a cool idea.
But that doesn't seem to be the focus here, and I'm extremely skeptical that this will end up anywhere interesting. A metaverse concept is more or less completely orthogonal to other useful things you might do with AR or VR.
Metaverse is an investing buzzword, like crypto has become. Actually, I’m somewhat convinced VR will never be a completely viable mainstream product (it’ll have its industrial uses, just as it has since the 1990s, it’ll just never enter the home in a huge way, and gaming chasing after VR will just marginalize gaming further). Crypto may have some long term value, though I feel like investing in crypto today is like investing in a dotcom in 1999 or 2000. Time has vindicated the Internet as a concept, but a bunch of people still lost their shirts in 2001, in part because of all the dodgy VC investments in startups that had little more than a catchy domain name to their name. But also, think about 1999, what seems like the more sensible viable idea? An e-commerce pet supply store or a vague “everything store”? The former has a sensible concept, one you can work your head around, while the other is abstract. But the former was pets.com, and the latter is now the largest retailer in the world. It’s hard to guess what will or won’t be the next big thing, as well as what will survive the bubble burst and strengthen afterwards. And the cost for getting it wrong is losing your shirt, and crypto is about at the bubble burst point.
Meta has certainly used crypto as a buzzword connected to its metaverse ideas (since they’ve specifically discussed NFTs as part of their metaverse concept). Metaverse to me just sounds like Second Life plus VR plus federalized infrastructure (multiple companies create content for it, content and interaction is spread across multiple providers). Like, you could play existing games (say, via Xbox Live) with your Twitch followers on your Oculus VR headset or something like that, while wearing a one of a kind virtual Gucci face mask, all the while buying new NFTs within that game (peak 2022, I suppose, and we haven’t even left January yet).
Why don’t I think VR will be a truly viable mainstream product? I think the motion sickness is largely an intractable problem short of brain stem jacks or other invasive technical solutions. And I don’t think people want physically invasive implants for most things, people want to blame their tech when something goes wrong (kinda like “the dog ate my homework”) and invasive implants blur the line between people and their tools. Plus, stuff needs the power to be turned off, people are increasingly choosing to connect when they want and disconnect when they can, and the more tech pushes harder the more people reserve time to disconnect. Edit: Plus, invasive implants require invasive surgery of the sort that you can’t really do annually. There’s not an upgrade cycle for pacemakers, after all! Lacking the upgrade cycle capability means that there’s not a lot of sustaining money in invasive implants.