I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
> not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable.
The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.
I think that Kinect and Hololens, or Magic Leap, or the VisioPro and the numerous other attempts are not simply adjacent, they are parts of the same ontology.
The goal is to replace displays and interactions by something new, more immersive, spatial and relying on movements rather than mechanical buttons.
And in my opinion they all failed for the same reasons, and it is on the input side.
The idea of a metaverse as a new internet was a way to capture was was seen an an inevitable evolution, but in the grand scheme of things, this is almost anecdotal.
Everything Meta did to make it a "platform" just contributed to making it worse than VRchat, a product by a company many many times smaller. It felt very designed with a "look at what we can do for Meta" and not "why would consumers use this over alternatives?" which always felt doomed from the start.
Meta (Facebook) always had a problem in execution even when their vision was solid which is sadly a rare occasion. This is why meta just buys products instead of developing its own (Instagram, Whatsapp, etc). It had a moment with the ray bans but that didn't last, the second iteration was meta'd all over.
> Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Well, I think of that more being due to their mismanagement with the whole WMR ecosystem. "Sterile corporate VR meeting rooms" sounds like exactly something that would have been from Microsoft rather than Facebook, but they tried too hard in some aspects (a half dozen companies making nearly-identical-but-not-really headsets! support built into the OS so deep that to remove it they had to brick everyone's headsets!) and not at all in others.
Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
This is revisionist, Microsoft has been tilting at the same windmill for a long time too.
They even created and subsequently removed their own native platform for Windows, used by many hardware vendors, whose products were bricked by the Windows update that removed the feature.
>Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse"
holy revisionism batman. It's literally right in https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/. Half the page is "you can watch movies in 3D", the other half is "you can be next to people". They rewrote the visual appearance of all their OSes to match liquid glass on the Vision Pro. Their goggles display your eyes because they expected you to wear them so long it would make it feel more natural to the plebs around you not wearing them and not joining you enjoying spatial sound. Half their ad copy is about "making it feel like you're working next to people".
Apple went all in onto the whole Metaverse crap. They paid off just about every major tech reviewer, tech influencer and even tech bros with following on Twitter (and here, too) with "early access programs" to the Vision Pro. At least can give them kind of the benefit of the doubt because they somewhat quickly saw that it was a dead end.
I'm kind of sad they're now officially dumping it, it was always so much fun to see completely fake sponsored discussions on the Metaverse and Metaverse ads in podcasts, and book publications about it. There's something satisfying about watching that whole universe of cognitive dissonance and pretense. Like a sandbox demonstration of the fake hype this industry often indulges in.
Zuck and Co just completely failed to read the room. Horizons didn't fail because the technology wasn't ready - it failed because nobody actually wanted the product. It didn't solve any problem and added a ton of friction (headsets, eye goggles, no legs, etc). The headsets were uncomfortable and isolating. The vibes were creepy and weird.
The rolled it out like a cheesy corporate team-building mandatory exercise, not something where anyone would want to actually spend any time by choice.
I used to work at meta, I was in one of the many research teams that were upstream of horizon.
The Failure was pretty much entirely Zuck's fault, in the same way that when a ship smashes into rocks, its the captain's responsibility.
The first big problem is that there was never a clear definition of what "the metaverse" was mean to be. It was a pivot that kinda appear after orion (the AR glasses that were supposed to ship in 2020 Q3) failed to ship.
A small team had made a VR clone of roblox, where you could make your own games in VR. It was low poly and stuttery on the Quest. Another team was working on getting hand interaction into the quest. A third team thought "hmm, we have a avatar system, what if we can type on keyboards? could we have meetings"
The meeting system and the roblox clone carried on, vaguely separately. Then Zuck saw them and decided that they needed 500 more engineers each. Time passed, progress wasn't fast enough, so more engineers were smeared in.
Then the meta rebrand, and then the whole weird everything smashed together branding.
All the while more engineers were being piled in, most of them had no experience in 3d, let alone games.
But, that would have been fine if someone at the top had been steering, making joined up product decisions, Advocating for the users. carmack sorta tried, but a) he wasn't the easiest to work with and B) Boz thought he knew better
TLDR:
Zuck can't product for shit. He thought that shipping disjointed features would make a platform. It didn't. He also thought that dumping 11,000 people into an org, most of which have no experience of games, VR, 3d or graphics would lead to a good outcome.
The Oculus is actually pretty decent for the price and as a standalone device. The issue is the OS feels so... like it was built by a big company with a dysfunctional org chart?
It's still an unfocused mess.
The bigger issue is, VR will ALWAYS be a niche thing. Always on AR glasses are the real future bet, not a niche industry.
VR will never be as big as Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp. It just doesn't make sense to invest so much into it. Not sure what Zuck doesn't see this?
Speaking of Apple, and honesty asking: how are their VR devices going? Looks like they released a spec'ed up version with the M5 processor end of 2025 but, what's their future? There was some (artificial?) hype in the beginning, are people actually using it? What's the SV landscape?
> many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
As a VR enthusiast, I beg to differ. Anyone who had spent a lot of time in the space knew that this was largely a hardware problem.
You need a lightweight, see-through head mounted display. It needs to be aware of local lighting conditions and does more than just room mapping, which means it needs a lot of compute power. It needs to have eye tracking (for minor perceptual angle drawing, at least), a high resolution (or light field) display. It needs to stay cool, and have a 6+ hour battery life (which is one working session). Oh, and people don't like any tethers. Or controllers. Which means extremely accurate hand tracking and integration with a keyboard/mouse. Price doesn't matter, as much as people think. AVP costs less today than a mid tier powerbook 25 years ago. But that also needs to come down.
Apple Vision Pro is the first VR/AR headset to come close, by the way. And even that is very far off. In fact, I'd blame that more for this shutdown than anything single other thing: it demonstrated that Meta's hardware labs were so fundamentally off for what they were trying to achieve that it basically rendered their entire investment useless.
No, Microsoft bailed pretty early. Apple gave it one shot and gave up.
The entire VR/AR industry sort of crumpled up and died while metaverse was still burning a billion dollars a day.
I worked in a VR startup at the time. Nobody could find a customer and all the competing startups slowly bled to death (including mine). Everyone was really holding their breath that Apple Vision would bring some life back to the industry, but once it became clear that it was a flop, everyone gave up.
As a VRChat regular, Meta's VR world efforts have been hilarious every step of the way. So long and thanks for all the headsets! :)
Maybe not everything has to be the next big thing for everyone. Maybe it's valuable for smaller companies or sovereign divisions to find niche markets, and simply build products and services for modest profits for strong customer bases that will never hit hypergrowth. (And are therefore resistant to the cancerous financialization that hypergrowth invites/incites)
I hope they figure out how to make a modest but steady profit making headsets still. The Quest Pro is still my favorite headset, ever since I ditched the awful controllers and went back to Index controllers.
Then again, the Steam Frame is likely to deliver us from this reliance, though it would be really nice to keep having budget headset options.
"Facebook/Meta’s Horizon Worlds is officially sunsetting its VR version in June in a move that will probably make all five of its players sad.
The Mark Zuckerberg metaverse monstrosity has been around since 2020 and was designed as a virtual reality metaverse world back when people were trying to make metaverse things happen and pretending Second Life didn’t exist. (It was a deeply exhausting era.) However, Horizon Worlds’ game/world/metaverse was poorly received and widely mocked, owing largely to dreadful graphics, redundant content, and oh yeah, that whole thing where people didn’t have legs. The boondoggle has led to thousands of layoffs and billions in financial losses, proving it is still possible for companies to lose money trying to make VR happen."
As an engineer I love that Zuck likes to throw his money around. He has been one of the big reasons for SWE salary inflation over the past 15 years. We should be thankful that not every company is relentlessly cost cutting
I am still surprised that they thought they'd see success with the extremely low quality version they shipped at launch. Just awful models and missing features along with a completely lackluster and shallow vision for what any sort of VR world could be.
Like, how did Zuck look at what was being demoed and think "yes, this is worth shipping" at a time when the closest analogue, 3D games and CG movies, were delivering fidelity that was ~4 hardware generations ahead, in implementation and in design.
To be impressed by and willing to sell the world on his metaverse implementation in that state... it felt like the dude hadn't seen any digital 3d entertainment since 2002.
The problem is that this cool technology got taken over and advanced by companies, Meta and Apple, that are not games companies and do not understand nor are interested in games.
So what occurred was an exercise in trying to force a square peg into a round hole, while the actual obviously interesting use of the technology (games!) was sidelined and ignored.
It's a real shame I picked up a PSVR and really enjoyed playing around with it. Seems like this particular niche however is not enough to fund the mega expenditure required to move the technology to the next level where it would genuinely get more mass adoption.
As it is feels like VR is going to die out at the Wii U point, just before it gets technically good enough (read lightweight) to be the successful Switch.
I was surprised by how may VR games I played and how many hours I put into it once I got a headset.
That being said I still think VR will always be a niche thing. We had VR headsets decades ago, aimed at the kind of person who builds a full cockpit setup at home for playing extremely nerdy flight sims. Now things are amazing if you're one of those people but I dont see VR ever being truly popular.
Somewhat related, Meta recently introduced SysPTW which is basically frame generation for the Quest:
> We’re introducing System Positional TimeWarp (SysPTW) from Depth-From-Stereo to Quest headsets. PTW uses real-time scene depth to reduce visual judder and lag when apps drop frames, making movement in VR smoother and more comfortable. [...] You can expect a more stable experience, especially in demanding social and gaming apps.
The "demanding social apps" they aren't naming here is almost certainly VRChat which is poorly optimized on the Quest.
I am so glad this product is failing/failed, and I find myself truly and existentially rooting for the glasses with the cameras to die a similar fate.
I have so many questions about the overarching product vision of Meta and can't help but think they're going to continue to struggle with everything that isn't "serve more relevant ads on Instagram."
Anecdote: my most vivid memory of their "VR vision" is virtual versions of Mark and another exec high-fiving in front of a flooded Puerto Rico. Classy.
I bought my son a Meta Quest headset and a second one for me to use while playing with him. Honestly, it kind of makes me sick when I use it. Will have to see if it gets any better the next time we play. I'm kind of lazy and just want to lie down when using it, but the last time I tried using it I had to stand up to be able to do whatever it was we were doing.
I actually think there's a huge number of people who want to do online social "world"/ "reality" -- just not without the "3D VR" art. I'm talking like old school MOOs and MUDs but modernized -- or something with a 2d "Zelda overworld" or "isometric" UI even. Something that is less literal, and more "use your imagination."
The immersive 3d stuff is "wizbang neat" to Zuckerberg and investors and gamers. But actually most "regular people" I know don't actually like being "in" such environments. Some people get dizzy and sick. Some people don't like dissociating from the "real" world like that, even for simple 3d games. Some people are visually disabled. Or just don't enjoy the modality.
But more than anything, no matter what, it's always awkward in its immersion and people's imaginations will always be far richer than the uncanny and limited simulated "3d" world that a computer can deliver. Even if you had 99% fidelity, it'll still be a poor simulacrum that often leaves you feeling poorer.
I think Zuckerberg completely misread what his own customer base / world audience wanted because of his own generational biases growing up with technical "lawnmower man" fantasies and fiction, and a misplaced philosophical bias where he believes transcendent, progressive technology leading inevitably in this direction. Because that's what the 1990s and early 2000s was pushing in gaming and other tech. Having billions of dollars at his disposal, and brought up to want and see this future, he saw it as both inevitable and something that he could be pushing the forefront of.
Yes people want to connect with other people in online social spaces. And I think they're probably very excited to do so in a manner which models the thing/place/object aspect of the "real world" rather than the glorified magazine / bulletin board which is Facebook. Especially if they can create and author and extend that world from within.
But I don't think they want to strap facehuggers to their face and do that in simulated three dimensions. And I don't think it's necessary to do the latter to get the former.
(But I'm biased, I've been trying to rebuild the magic I found in LambdaMOO in various forms ... for the last 30 years... https://timbran.org/moor.html )
About time. I guess there are worse things Facebook could have spent their money on?
I remember saying to someone one day that while Facebook kind of seems to be going places with their VR hardware, their software division were just reinventing Nintendo Miis, but worse. Anyone who actually cared about doing VR social stuff were going to use VRChat, as that was a much better product.
Even then, if you just look at Facebook's VR hardware in a vacuum, sure, it got better, pretty good even, but not to the point of appealing beyond niche groups, i.e. VR gamers and people who use VRChat, and making VR appealing beyond those groups is a thing I don't think is going to happen.
It would appear that the Metaverse (as envisioned by Meta) was nothing more than a way to "grow" when there was no other reasonable path. It was a solution to this problem and this problem alone. Nobody wanted it.
Then AI comes along and offers real growth opportunity. But of course, Meta fumbled that one out of the gate because they are more interested in winning than in actually offering anything of value. So they figured they could sabotage the whole thing by open sourcing Llama. Then they got steamrolled by everyone actually creating value for people instead of following their tried and true parasite model.
No tech company in this era has been more destructive to society than Meta. Their utter lack of principles has led them down this path. Ironically the most value they have generated is to their investors and especially their employees who are all wealthy now, funded with advertising dollars from across the economy.
I am a bit late to this thread, nevertheless, I wanted to put my thoughts down as well.
Horizon Worlds and the Metaverse were both pitched as a "social" platform. And this in itself is where I believe they went wrong. It fundamentally differs from my limited experience with VR and its potential. I see VR as an "anti-social" platform rather than a "social" one - and I say this in a good way.
When I put on a VR headset, its as if I am shunning my current world. The experiences I find valuable in VR are the ones that elevate that feeling - imagine watching a basketball game courtside, or watching NASCAR while floating right above the track, or watching a live concert happening halfway across the world, or VR tourism (visiting different places anytime you want, from some breathtaking angles - my most memorable experience of this was a video on Angel Falls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_tqK4eqelA), or even the classics like playing VR games and watching movies. I believe that they should have doubled down on providing a much richer "anti-social" experience.
It's funny that Horizon Worlds will shut down before its actual launch here. Meta Quest headsets are sold here but the Horizon Worlds part of the OS was entirely blocked off. (The mobile app shows it, but I could never get the headset to navigate anywhere, just stuck in the homeworld lobby)
It is really amazing how bloated the reality labs division is. Triple layers of directors and VPs. They have been running this grift for years.
When interacting with them I was left wondering whether they were delusional.
But the explanation is simpler: they were just lying through their teeth to empire build.
Can you believe they even built their own game engine to replace Unity? So may layers of principal engineers, directors, etc. I’m sure it will be cancelled if it hasn’t been already.
175 comments
I'm not sure I have ever witnessed such a comprehensive industrial failure in the software world. There were some discussions about Facebook's ability to pull it off, but not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
> not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable.
The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.
The goal is to replace displays and interactions by something new, more immersive, spatial and relying on movements rather than mechanical buttons.
And in my opinion they all failed for the same reasons, and it is on the input side.
The idea of a metaverse as a new internet was a way to capture was was seen an an inevitable evolution, but in the grand scheme of things, this is almost anecdotal.
> Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Well, I think of that more being due to their mismanagement with the whole WMR ecosystem. "Sterile corporate VR meeting rooms" sounds like exactly something that would have been from Microsoft rather than Facebook, but they tried too hard in some aspects (a half dozen companies making nearly-identical-but-not-really headsets! support built into the OS so deep that to remove it they had to brick everyone's headsets!) and not at all in others.
>
Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.This is revisionist, Microsoft has been tilting at the same windmill for a long time too.
They even created and subsequently removed their own native platform for Windows, used by many hardware vendors, whose products were bricked by the Windows update that removed the feature.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mixed_Reality
all-inwhen a more or less complete write down leaves them in the top 10 largest companies.>Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse"
holy revisionism batman. It's literally right in https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/. Half the page is "you can watch movies in 3D", the other half is "you can be next to people". They rewrote the visual appearance of all their OSes to match liquid glass on the Vision Pro. Their goggles display your eyes because they expected you to wear them so long it would make it feel more natural to the plebs around you not wearing them and not joining you enjoying spatial sound. Half their ad copy is about "making it feel like you're working next to people".
Apple went all in onto the whole Metaverse crap. They paid off just about every major tech reviewer, tech influencer and even tech bros with following on Twitter (and here, too) with "early access programs" to the Vision Pro. At least can give them kind of the benefit of the doubt because they somewhat quickly saw that it was a dead end.
The rolled it out like a cheesy corporate team-building mandatory exercise, not something where anyone would want to actually spend any time by choice.
> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone.
I used to work at meta, I was in one of the many research teams that were upstream of horizon.
The Failure was pretty much entirely Zuck's fault, in the same way that when a ship smashes into rocks, its the captain's responsibility.
The first big problem is that there was never a clear definition of what "the metaverse" was mean to be. It was a pivot that kinda appear after orion (the AR glasses that were supposed to ship in 2020 Q3) failed to ship.
A small team had made a VR clone of roblox, where you could make your own games in VR. It was low poly and stuttery on the Quest. Another team was working on getting hand interaction into the quest. A third team thought "hmm, we have a avatar system, what if we can type on keyboards? could we have meetings"
The meeting system and the roblox clone carried on, vaguely separately. Then Zuck saw them and decided that they needed 500 more engineers each. Time passed, progress wasn't fast enough, so more engineers were smeared in.
Then the meta rebrand, and then the whole weird everything smashed together branding.
All the while more engineers were being piled in, most of them had no experience in 3d, let alone games.
But, that would have been fine if someone at the top had been steering, making joined up product decisions, Advocating for the users. carmack sorta tried, but a) he wasn't the easiest to work with and B) Boz thought he knew better
TLDR: Zuck can't product for shit. He thought that shipping disjointed features would make a platform. It didn't. He also thought that dumping 11,000 people into an org, most of which have no experience of games, VR, 3d or graphics would lead to a good outcome.
It's still an unfocused mess.
The bigger issue is, VR will ALWAYS be a niche thing. Always on AR glasses are the real future bet, not a niche industry.
VR will never be as big as Facebook / Instagram / WhatsApp. It just doesn't make sense to invest so much into it. Not sure what Zuck doesn't see this?
I've always been blown away by the fact that they didn't more fully pursue VR gaming. I think they could have found a more enthusiastic audience.
> many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
As a VR enthusiast, I beg to differ. Anyone who had spent a lot of time in the space knew that this was largely a hardware problem.
You need a lightweight, see-through head mounted display. It needs to be aware of local lighting conditions and does more than just room mapping, which means it needs a lot of compute power. It needs to have eye tracking (for minor perceptual angle drawing, at least), a high resolution (or light field) display. It needs to stay cool, and have a 6+ hour battery life (which is one working session). Oh, and people don't like any tethers. Or controllers. Which means extremely accurate hand tracking and integration with a keyboard/mouse. Price doesn't matter, as much as people think. AVP costs less today than a mid tier powerbook 25 years ago. But that also needs to come down.
Apple Vision Pro is the first VR/AR headset to come close, by the way. And even that is very far off. In fact, I'd blame that more for this shutdown than anything single other thing: it demonstrated that Meta's hardware labs were so fundamentally off for what they were trying to achieve that it basically rendered their entire investment useless.
The entire VR/AR industry sort of crumpled up and died while metaverse was still burning a billion dollars a day.
I worked in a VR startup at the time. Nobody could find a customer and all the competing startups slowly bled to death (including mine). Everyone was really holding their breath that Apple Vision would bring some life back to the industry, but once it became clear that it was a flop, everyone gave up.
Maybe not everything has to be the next big thing for everyone. Maybe it's valuable for smaller companies or sovereign divisions to find niche markets, and simply build products and services for modest profits for strong customer bases that will never hit hypergrowth. (And are therefore resistant to the cancerous financialization that hypergrowth invites/incites)
I hope they figure out how to make a modest but steady profit making headsets still. The Quest Pro is still my favorite headset, ever since I ditched the awful controllers and went back to Index controllers.
Then again, the Steam Frame is likely to deliver us from this reliance, though it would be really nice to keep having budget headset options.
"Facebook/Meta’s Horizon Worlds is officially sunsetting its VR version in June in a move that will probably make all five of its players sad.
The Mark Zuckerberg metaverse monstrosity has been around since 2020 and was designed as a virtual reality metaverse world back when people were trying to make metaverse things happen and pretending Second Life didn’t exist. (It was a deeply exhausting era.) However, Horizon Worlds’ game/world/metaverse was poorly received and widely mocked, owing largely to dreadful graphics, redundant content, and oh yeah, that whole thing where people didn’t have legs. The boondoggle has led to thousands of layoffs and billions in financial losses, proving it is still possible for companies to lose money trying to make VR happen."
> With its potential to generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, the metaverse is too big for companies to ignore. [1]
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-s...
Like, how did Zuck look at what was being demoed and think "yes, this is worth shipping" at a time when the closest analogue, 3D games and CG movies, were delivering fidelity that was ~4 hardware generations ahead, in implementation and in design.
To be impressed by and willing to sell the world on his metaverse implementation in that state... it felt like the dude hadn't seen any digital 3d entertainment since 2002.
So what occurred was an exercise in trying to force a square peg into a round hole, while the actual obviously interesting use of the technology (games!) was sidelined and ignored.
It's a real shame I picked up a PSVR and really enjoyed playing around with it. Seems like this particular niche however is not enough to fund the mega expenditure required to move the technology to the next level where it would genuinely get more mass adoption.
As it is feels like VR is going to die out at the Wii U point, just before it gets technically good enough (read lightweight) to be the successful Switch.
That being said I still think VR will always be a niche thing. We had VR headsets decades ago, aimed at the kind of person who builds a full cockpit setup at home for playing extremely nerdy flight sims. Now things are amazing if you're one of those people but I dont see VR ever being truly popular.
> We’re introducing System Positional TimeWarp (SysPTW) from Depth-From-Stereo to Quest headsets. PTW uses real-time scene depth to reduce visual judder and lag when apps drop frames, making movement in VR smoother and more comfortable. [...] You can expect a more stable experience, especially in demanding social and gaming apps.
The "demanding social apps" they aren't naming here is almost certainly VRChat which is poorly optimized on the Quest.
I am so glad this product is failing/failed, and I find myself truly and existentially rooting for the glasses with the cameras to die a similar fate.
I have so many questions about the overarching product vision of Meta and can't help but think they're going to continue to struggle with everything that isn't "serve more relevant ads on Instagram."
Anecdote: my most vivid memory of their "VR vision" is virtual versions of Mark and another exec high-fiving in front of a flooded Puerto Rico. Classy.
The immersive 3d stuff is "wizbang neat" to Zuckerberg and investors and gamers. But actually most "regular people" I know don't actually like being "in" such environments. Some people get dizzy and sick. Some people don't like dissociating from the "real" world like that, even for simple 3d games. Some people are visually disabled. Or just don't enjoy the modality.
But more than anything, no matter what, it's always awkward in its immersion and people's imaginations will always be far richer than the uncanny and limited simulated "3d" world that a computer can deliver. Even if you had 99% fidelity, it'll still be a poor simulacrum that often leaves you feeling poorer.
I think Zuckerberg completely misread what his own customer base / world audience wanted because of his own generational biases growing up with technical "lawnmower man" fantasies and fiction, and a misplaced philosophical bias where he believes transcendent, progressive technology leading inevitably in this direction. Because that's what the 1990s and early 2000s was pushing in gaming and other tech. Having billions of dollars at his disposal, and brought up to want and see this future, he saw it as both inevitable and something that he could be pushing the forefront of.
Yes people want to connect with other people in online social spaces. And I think they're probably very excited to do so in a manner which models the thing/place/object aspect of the "real world" rather than the glorified magazine / bulletin board which is Facebook. Especially if they can create and author and extend that world from within.
But I don't think they want to strap facehuggers to their face and do that in simulated three dimensions. And I don't think it's necessary to do the latter to get the former.
(But I'm biased, I've been trying to rebuild the magic I found in LambdaMOO in various forms ... for the last 30 years... https://timbran.org/moor.html )
I remember saying to someone one day that while Facebook kind of seems to be going places with their VR hardware, their software division were just reinventing Nintendo Miis, but worse. Anyone who actually cared about doing VR social stuff were going to use VRChat, as that was a much better product.
Even then, if you just look at Facebook's VR hardware in a vacuum, sure, it got better, pretty good even, but not to the point of appealing beyond niche groups, i.e. VR gamers and people who use VRChat, and making VR appealing beyond those groups is a thing I don't think is going to happen.
Then AI comes along and offers real growth opportunity. But of course, Meta fumbled that one out of the gate because they are more interested in winning than in actually offering anything of value. So they figured they could sabotage the whole thing by open sourcing Llama. Then they got steamrolled by everyone actually creating value for people instead of following their tried and true parasite model.
No tech company in this era has been more destructive to society than Meta. Their utter lack of principles has led them down this path. Ironically the most value they have generated is to their investors and especially their employees who are all wealthy now, funded with advertising dollars from across the economy.
Horizon Worlds and the Metaverse were both pitched as a "social" platform. And this in itself is where I believe they went wrong. It fundamentally differs from my limited experience with VR and its potential. I see VR as an "anti-social" platform rather than a "social" one - and I say this in a good way.
When I put on a VR headset, its as if I am shunning my current world. The experiences I find valuable in VR are the ones that elevate that feeling - imagine watching a basketball game courtside, or watching NASCAR while floating right above the track, or watching a live concert happening halfway across the world, or VR tourism (visiting different places anytime you want, from some breathtaking angles - my most memorable experience of this was a video on Angel Falls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_tqK4eqelA), or even the classics like playing VR games and watching movies. I believe that they should have doubled down on providing a much richer "anti-social" experience.
When interacting with them I was left wondering whether they were delusional.
But the explanation is simpler: they were just lying through their teeth to empire build.
Can you believe they even built their own game engine to replace Unity? So may layers of principal engineers, directors, etc. I’m sure it will be cancelled if it hasn’t been already.
This news is perfect fodder for slightly dystopian creative writing.