Metaverse is increasingly trending since Mark Zuckerberg announced (Oct 28th 2021) both the rebranding of Facebook to Meta and the next big thing, the “Metaverse”
As much as I enjoy seeing technology maturing, being democratized and becoming accessible, I also want to stay realistic at the same time. Some reflections about the current hype or the next evolutionary step in human interconnectedness.
- The Metaverse emphasises on VR and AR as medium to immerse yourself. VR has seen several waves of adoption since 1970, growing from research lab exclusive use to a mass consumer product. But until today, the general adoption has not grown significantly outside the gaming and simulation niche.
- While several expensive high-end headsets have been released and announced to enterprise customers (Varjo, Pimax, XTAL,..) there is not much in the consumer space, the Quest 2 was released in 2020 (overview). Though everyone suddenly is working on something (Apple,..). If the Metaverse is the next internet accessible by everyone, we need to have devices as cheap as mobile phones. And NO, Google Cardboard is not an option.
AR has still long way to achieve mixed reality with seamless embedded information. In 2020 AR disappeared from the Gartner hypecycle in 2020, even predicting enterprise adoption in 2021 (didnt happen?). - The human bioware is not being updated. Newer VR devices are getting better, more lightweight, higher resolution, less latency etc., but VR fatigue and VR sickness are still an issue. Though you can get used to it but it still will affect the adoption. You choose the wrong environment or platform to get started into VR and it spoils your first experience, you might leave for good. I know few people being “in VR” for more than 1 hour regularly.
- Believing this is the next step in the evolution, why should we solely rely on the company META, their potential influence on behaviour and opinion will grow further. Right now, the industry should discuss standards for seamless interopability, security and data exchange, ensuring the Metaverse will not become a separate, propietary internet, but an accessible communication and sharing platform, like the internet itself in its beginning. If we would had a proprietary approach in the 1990s, HTML would not be readable today, rather a binary blob to open in the browser, open source might not be as widespread as we see it today. The Metaverse must be open, no matter what hardware or platform is used to access it.
- META has not yet released Horizon Home, the video material we see is conceptual work and visions (‘Not actual images. Images are strictly for illustrative purpose only.’), solely the Horizon Workrooms are available as beta (at the time of writing this post), and only compatible with the Quest 2 (don’t even works with Rift S). You can use flat screen access though, which makes little sense to me. The Quest 2 will not be able to render the illustrative concepts, except could stream hig-end rendered content.
- The same time NVIDIA comes with their take of the Metaverse toolset, Omniverse, but with existing products and plugins and a tangible roadmap.
Conclusion:
- Lets’s stay excited, but realistic. Embrace innovative ideas to come.
- Ensure it will be the Open Metaverse.
- Do good and avoid evil. Not implementing the dystopian future depicted in the referenced literature (Snow Crash and others)
- I am eager to try, experiment and pilot. Especially in the enterprise context, there are use-cases for Digital Twin, Simulation and Collaboration which make sense and will benefit.
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