https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... zuckerberg
If nothing else, Zuckerberg has popularised the term “metaverse”, even if he didn’t invent it, and definitions of what it means vary. Zuckerberg explained it as “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it”. Rather than our current 2D, screen-based internet, in other words, the metaverse will be a 3D virtual space, accessed by either a VR headset or AR (augmented reality) glasses, which superimpose a layer of digital information on top of the visible world.
Matthew Ball, tech investor and author of The Metaverse: How It Will Revolutionise Everything, defines the metaverse as “a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds”, with individual presence and continuity of data. He has to explain it less and less, he says: “A year ago, it was mostly ‘what is the metaverse?’ Questions now are a lot more practical: what will be here? When? For whom? How, and why?”
The “why” is a particularly good question when it comes to Meta. “You’re going to be able to do almost anything you can imagine,” said Zuckerberg in his intro video last year. “Get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create …”
At the time we were just coming out of the pandemic. Remote working, video calling and e-commerce had suddenly become the norm. “Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended,” Zuckerberg said in a recent staff email. “I did, too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.” Post-pandemic, it turned out people still preferred meeting face to face or on a video call to donning a clunky VR headset and dragging your legless avatar into a virtual meeting room.
It has been a similar story on the leisure side. Meta’s Quest VR headsets are the market leader, but most buyers are not using them to flock to Meta’s principal app, Horizon Worlds – which the company describes as “a synchronous social network where creators can build engaging worlds”. Meta set a target of 500,000 Horizon Worlds users by the end of 2022; the current figure is nearer 200,000 – down from 300,000 in February, which suggests many first-time visitors are not returning. It has been criticised for programming bugs, instability, rudimentary graphics and a general sense of boredom.
From my own visits to Horizon Worlds, the 3D motion and audio were fine but the graphics were basic, often garish and textureless: a good two decades behind today’s best video games. The feeling is of a sparsely attended trade fair.