What’s wrong with the ‘Metaverse’? Insider’s Postmortem is a new guest essay I wrote for VentureBeat. We encourage you to read and share on social media! quotes around "metaverse" Because what I’m talking about is not the actual implementation, but the strawman version that most people in tech have been playing around with lately. opener:
It’s been two years since Facebook changed its name to Meta, sparking a brief but burning enthusiasm for the “Metaverse,” a science-fiction concept that suddenly seemed like the next inevitable leap in technology. But for most people in technology, the term has since lost its luster and seems to be replaced by any product with “artificial intelligence” in the description.
But the real story of the metaverse’s rise and fall in public awareness is much more complex and interesting than simply the short life cycle of a buzzword. It also reflects a collective failure of both imagination and understanding.
One thing I haven’t discussed in a while is gender bias, which is costing the industry tens of billions of dollars, especially Meta.
Regrettably, Zuckerberg and his CTO Andrew Bosworth have pushed the Metaverse concept, which centers around the Quest headset. To do so, they had to overlook compelling evidence raised by Danah Boyd, a senior Microsoft researcher when Microsoft acquired Oculus in 2014, that women were more likely to feel nauseous when using VR.
While I was writing this, I received a call at the end of 2022.Creating an important metaverse, Dana said that no one at Oculus or Meta followed up on the research questions she raised. Over the years I’ve asked several senior Meta staff (past and present) about this, but have yet to receive a proper response. Unsurprisingly, the estimated installed base for Meta’s Quest 2 VR headset is only around 20 million units, which is far less than the number of customers for a major video game console. A product that makes half the population vomit is not intended for the mass market, let alone a reliable foundation for building a metaverse.
Obviously that brings out quite a few things. Creating an important metaverseBut my hope is that the wider tech industry gets the basic gist and understands how the concept has become so widely misunderstood. Have a good weekend!