Comment by mistersquid
4 days ago
> not that long ago, many still saw the "metaverse" vision as inevitable; a clear trajectory for the future of the internet.
> And the failure isn't Zuckerberg's alone. Microsoft, Apple, and a good many others all crashed into the same wall.
This is revisionary. Mark Zuckerberg's Meta was the only company to go all-in on the "metaverse". Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse". Apple's Spatial Computing and its use of Personas and SharePlay is not like the "metaverse", despite the comparison between Meta's and Apple's efforts being perhaps inevitable.
The metaverse, as Meta pursued it, was a social media virtual reality space, and only one of the three companies you mention touted and offered a product for users in this space.
I think that Kinect and Hololens, or Magic Leap, or the VisioPro and the numerous other attempts are not simply adjacent, they are parts of the same ontology.
The goal is to replace displays and interactions by something new, more immersive, spatial and relying on movements rather than mechanical buttons.
And in my opinion they all failed for the same reasons, and it is on the input side.
The idea of a metaverse as a new internet was a way to capture was was seen an an inevitable evolution, but in the grand scheme of things, this is almost anecdotal.
Everything Meta did to make it a "platform" just contributed to making it worse than VRchat, a product by a company many many times smaller. It felt very designed with a "look at what we can do for Meta" and not "why would consumers use this over alternatives?" which always felt doomed from the start.
Meta (Facebook) always had a problem in execution even when their vision was solid which is sadly a rare occasion. This is why meta just buys products instead of developing its own (Instagram, Whatsapp, etc). It had a moment with the ray bans but that didn't last, the second iteration was meta'd all over.
This; I mean, they even renamed the company.
They needed to rename the company anyway to get away from bad press. It worked. I think they're quite happy with their current name.
Yup. The Facebook brand was long dead, and Meta is a good tech name even outside of AR/VR or metaverse. The fact that no one calls the company Facebook anymore shows that the rebrand was successful.
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> It worked.
Debatable.
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Is it possible all this was a major ploy to get around antitrust? I'm aware FB has been working on VR for a while even beyond the Oculus that they purchased but it's like... "Facebook bought Whatsapp, yes, but; we're Meta"
the rename came at a nadir of "Facebook" brand when there was lots of hate for misinfo, genocide incitement on the platform, etc. I think that's the more important context rather than "lol i bet we'll fool the antitrust guys w/ a quick name change"
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> Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
Well, I think of that more being due to their mismanagement with the whole WMR ecosystem. "Sterile corporate VR meeting rooms" sounds like exactly something that would have been from Microsoft rather than Facebook, but they tried too hard in some aspects (a half dozen companies making nearly-identical-but-not-really headsets! support built into the OS so deep that to remove it they had to brick everyone's headsets!) and not at all in others.
> Microsoft has barely even dabbled in an adjacent area with the Hololens.
This is revisionist, Microsoft has been tilting at the same windmill for a long time too.
They even created and subsequently removed their own native platform for Windows, used by many hardware vendors, whose products were bricked by the Windows update that removed the feature.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mixed_Reality
I also commented on WMR, but I took that as MS not being "all-in on the metaverse". VR alone isn't the same thing, and HoloLens as a platform seemed to have more of a vision for working in shared mixed reality.
I love my WMR headset, but Microsoft wasn't really pushing hard for the kinds of "social" experiences Meta was trying to get us to participate in.
I am not sure we can say `all-in` when a more or less complete write down leaves them in the top 10 largest companies.
>Apple has essentially zero exposure to anything like the "metaverse"
holy revisionism batman. It's literally right in https://www.apple.com/apple-vision-pro/. Half the page is "you can watch movies in 3D", the other half is "you can be next to people". They rewrote the visual appearance of all their OSes to match liquid glass on the Vision Pro. Their goggles display your eyes because they expected you to wear them so long it would make it feel more natural to the plebs around you not wearing them and not joining you enjoying spatial sound. Half their ad copy is about "making it feel like you're working next to people".
Apple went all in onto the whole Metaverse crap. They paid off just about every major tech reviewer, tech influencer and even tech bros with following on Twitter (and here, too) with "early access programs" to the Vision Pro. At least can give them kind of the benefit of the doubt because they somewhat quickly saw that it was a dead end.