Arguably that's probably why Facebook's efforts are doomed to fail before they've even started. By branding and marketing and tying all of their "metaverse" activities to VR they've already lost in a lot of user mindset. The retrending blog post on the Requiem for the HMD [1][2] is more than enough reason to believe that VR (at it exists today, as it existed in 2019 when that blog post was written) is an albatross that Facebook has now tied around its neck as Meta.

People are already dismissing this "metaverse" furor as just more VR hype with a stupider name and the company "Meta" is risking killing the entire term "metaverse" and any usefulness it might have had altogether.

Ironically, by owning Facebook "Meta" should be in one of the best positions to build/sell a 2D "metaverse plane" as well as just about anyone else possibly could. Tear down some of the garden walls, allow a bit more of the old MySpace and Blog anarchy of clashing styles and user control, be a better web citizen. They aren't likely to do that because they are using "metaverse" as attempt to make more Oculus money and risking the Facebook lock in and walled garden for a vision with actual guts and takes risks doesn't seem to be in their interest.

[1] https://www.highfidelity.com/backlog/requiem-for-the-hmd

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29069381

That Requiem for the HMD article has not aged well. All of those issues are a matter of iterative improvements over what we have today, and the devices will be ready for mass adoption.

Have you seen the leaked Quest Pro design[1]? It's already close to being ski goggle size, and it's only a couple of generations away from something the size of sunglasses.

Displays are getting cheaper, better and higher resolution. UX is being improved, passthrough cameras already exist.

My estimate is that towards the end of this decade we'll see unprecedented adoption of VR/AR outside of the few niche use cases we see today.

Meta is jumping on the bandwagon early, making their brand synonymous with VR, and betting big that this will change how everyone uses computers today, and that it will be the tech to replace smartphones.

As much as I dislike that such a user hostile company is trying to popularize the metaverse/VR, I'm sure they did their research and are confident this will eventually sell like crazy. I think they're right.

[1]: https://nitter.eu/basti564/status/1452366495053488135

Right now the public perception remains that "good" VR/AR headsets are always five years away, since the 1990s.

Whether or not they did their research, whether or not we are just a few iterative improvements away from mass adoption, there's still just too much feeling of "same hype cycle, different day" from the average consumer (which is the point of that article, and my implication that VR is dead right now but it was Facebook's lucky albatross so they're tying it around their necks in the hopes it is still lucky while dead [1]).

[1] Spoiler alert for a classic poem used as a metaphor here: in the poem things do not go well from here. I am pessimistic about this marketing play for "Meta".

> Tear down some of the garden walls,

They used to be open. Cambridge Analytica came along and congress made them decide open was a liability. Sure they were starting to close down before congress, but now they're sure as hell not opening up.

That's not the garden walls to which I refer. I remember trying to program against Facebook even in the pre-Cambridge Analytica days. Sure the APIs had way more data, but it was all still siloed in that only apps that Facebook "vetted" were allowed in, and they were always strict about the CSS and components you were allowed to use and tight on the ways you were allowed to link people outside of Facebook itself.

I don't care if the data is locked down or not, the social graph isn't the interesting part of a "metaverse" and in some ways it is probably better locked up and that can remain Facebook's lock in to keep them interested in the project. The kind of garden walls I was talking about are more federative: bringing external content in, but in ways that are true to the outside content; not just confined to Facebook looks and styles and components, not confined to a bare amount of customization of boring card styles, not embedded in a "Facebook way" but in a "web way" (whatever that means, and it doesn't really feel like it means much at all after the imagination and wilds of the 1990s).

I referenced the anarchy and chaos of blogs and MySpace, specifically: it's about user control to "do ugly things", to escape the gray walls and graffiti "their spaces". If Facebook is a "space" today, it's a building full of cubicles all alike. Sure, you can hang photos in the cubicles and they've got colorful stock ones, but your still constrained to just those cubicle walls and they mandate a lot about the allowed size and frame styles. That's almost directly the antithesis of a user owned "metaverse" whether 2D or 3D.