No one can seem to come to the table with a compelling pitch for a metaverse and yet Facebook has changed their entire company name. Maybe they have one and they are afraid someone will beat them to market if they share it, but what they did share gave me PS Home in VR vibes. There is some neat tech there, but after the initial novelty I do not know who would want to interact in that way.
I don’t want to be overly negative. I think we may get there one day, I am just not optimistic based on any of the pitches I have heard so far. Right now there seems to be a lot of solutions in search of a problem and novelty experiences that are compelling for about the length of a typical tech demo only.
What are the things that VR makes easier? There are some exciting possibilities for games (I love playing around with Unity in VR!), but using a headset is more effort than a mouse and keyboard and monitor, and taking yourself completely out of your surroundings is an added level of separation. Qualitatively, it doesn't seem like the marginal benefits over games and social spaces on screens outweigh the costs for lots of users. Maybe further hardware and ergonomic improvements will tip that balance the other way though.
More egregious lately, in my mind, is how the conversation seems to have shifted to "the" metaverse, rather than "a" metaverse or metaverses. Having a single bounded spatial entity jibes with our intuitions drawn from the physical world and has made for some exciting settings in novels, but it's at odds with decades of precedent building virtual worlds for traditional computers. Metaverses should be like webpages - some small, some big, some simple, some elaborate, with no barriers to travel between them, built off a backbone of open protocols. An alternative of megacorp-curated experiences and artificially-imposed scarcity for the sake for making money seems far more bleak, I don't think it's a place where i could find fun or lasting value.
