It's not done yet. AI is the current buzz because we are starting to see some great products and uses for it, we have yet to see that with VR/AR but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. It's still early, I am not a fan of the 'metaverse' idea, but VR/AR still has a lot left to give.

But that's not to say it's not possible for a mainstream-successful iteration of the idea to exist. My personal feeling is that there is a viable path to mainstream success, though it's far from guaranteed that a player succeeds in taking said path.

The real question IMO isn't "can VR/AR be made mainstream successful" (this is largely unknowable until someone does it), the question is "can FB be the company that makes VR/AR mainstream successful".

And IMO the answer has always been no. If there is viability in the entire subfield I think Meta is poorly positioned to be the tip of the spear.

Its fundamental business model works against the interests of good products in this field (stuff every virtual surface full of ads! Inescapable eyeball tracking for MAXIMUM CONVERSION ATTRIBUTION!!!1one) - one can make a (good) argument about the implications of Meta's VR play with the interests of humanity, but I don't think we even need to get that deep. Their business model fundamentally is at odds with creating compelling products in this arena. So much of their product strategy seems to be stuck in the hole of "what is good for Meta" instead of "what is good for users".

And then there's seemingly the perennial issue of FB not being able to ooze any kind of desirability or cultural cachet, which is deeply necessary for any of this to reach the mainstream in a big way. Everything it touches, even before the VR/AR pivot, is like an even more corporate and dead-eyed version of EPCOT.

I don't personally see what's controversial with that claim and bet. Separately one can argue if the current tech is anywhere near good enough to achieve the N% gains but the common thread of VR/AR/metaverse as being a useless product forever is a textbook example of missing the forest through the trees.

And when I have it for work the play becomes more realistic.

So for me that's the killer feature of VR - portable monitor replacement - you can take it anywhere, pop it on and you're instantly in your virtual office. This would be worth 1000s $ if it "just worked" like Apple products do.

Apple and Microsoft are the only tech players I could see pulling this off because of the OS integration required. And Microsoft failed with Hololens.

The day I tried HoloLens I quickly saw there is much more potential in that tech than many thing.

A 360deg screen that you can take anywhere with you and that can give you a true field of depth / 3d view. When the devices will perform well enough and be portable enough, this will become huge.

With the obvious example being : parking instructions while driving a car

FB succeeded because it was in the right place at the right time. Sure, it positioned itself cleverly, but the moment in history was ripe for a social media company.

Things don't just succeed because they spark the imagination and you work really hard at them: they succeed because all the factors beyond your control are aligned, too.

Agree with most of what you said. But my take is, people would LOVE virtual reality if it were done well enough. We just don't seem to have the technical capability to pull it off well enough yet. Uncanny valley and all that.

Current VR can't even approach realism -- which keeps it out of the uncanny valley.

However, if the technology improves to the point where the graphics approach realistic, the uncanny valley will become a real problem.

For myself, I 100% agree.

Tired: Metaverse; Wired: Protoverse.

A far less monetized and more user content focused version of "the Metaverse" already exists: VRChat. It's been around since before Covid and it is still around. Granted, yes, it is still mostly a niche hobby for some very dedicated people, not all of whom even use VR, but it exists. I think the people who would have been interested in Meta's product looked at it and thought "But we already have a less crappy version of this that's not tied to a questionable company." Especially since Meta's handling of Oculus has been far from great (i.e. requiring a Facebook/Meta account just to use any headset, as opposed to the separate account like before).

But as I said, it's still fairly niche and mostly serves as an escape for people. I think slapping the whole "buy in-world items with crypto" thing on top of that just made the target group even smaller than before. It just felt like jumping onto any tech buzz words to broaden appeal, when it actually caused the opposite. For all the data they're supposed to have, that was poor decision making imo.

Yes there was a Big Spike in VR interest around Oculus, and most of the people who bought one have it sitting in a corner collecting dust...

But a significant subset of people continued to use it, and their usage is steadily growing. There are huge numbers of people willing to pay $500 -$2k, on each new device that comes out, just to "see if its ready".

There are tons of people who work from home on a couple monitors, who WANT to have a VR work setup that gives them screens the size of walls. Obviously the comfort, battery, and visual performance is not there yet, but most people have a feeling that would could just be a generation or two away from it.

I would guess that more than 50% of hacker news readers over 40 years old had an MP3 player BEFORE the iPod. They were all garbage and completely replaced when the iPod came out, but for the 2-3 years before the iPod, all the early adopters new something like that was coming and they were hungry for it.

I feel that's exactly where VR is.

No, they weren't. There were excellent ones. What they lacked was enough storage to carry your entire music library with you -- that was the problem the iPod addressed.

But in terms of playing music, the iPod was not exceptional.

Meanwhile the VR-as-monitor replacement fails due to the low resolution. VR headsets by design waste a ton of resolution to get a larger FOV. That's good for immersion and gaming, but renders desktop use impossible. It's possible to build headsets with a small FOV and high resolution, such as what Nreal is doing, but that's not something Meta is focusing on. Worse yet, they kind of pretended that the QuestPro was ready for that use case, but it's not even close.

I do agree that there is potential in VR, but Meta has been focusing on all the wrong things. They were far more concerned with gaining total control over the space then they are were about making VR actually worth having. Nobody is looking at Horizon World and goes "I wanna have that", it not only looks terrible compared to stuff we have outside of VR, it even looks terrible compared to all the non-Meta stuff we have in VR.

But that is all orthogonal to the "metaverse" as Meta envisions it, and I really don't see the utility of that.