Yesterday, I wrote about how confused I am about what problem Meta thinks it's solving by trying to integrate virtual reality into everyday life and how I simply don't understand what Meta thinks the value proposition of the metaverse is. And I stand by the spirit of what I said: I've still yet to see a VR application that delivers enough tangible value in my day-to-day work routine to justify spending a few thousand dollars on a bulky paperweight-with-eyeholes and strapping it to my face everyday to go to work.
But I did want to clarify or add a bit of nuance to my perspective on Meta's product strategy, because I don't think everything they are doing is bad. Even if I'm still fairly skeptical that VR will ever get adopted by the mainstream at the level of the smartphone, I've always believed that AR and mixed reality are much more interesting technologies that could very well enable the next revolutionary personal device. I fundamentally don't believe humans want to completely disengage from the real world; I think they just want technology to supplement it. In other words, AR > VR.
The mixed reality components of the new Meta Quest Pro show Facebook believes in this potential too. The example many reporters who demoed the product have been talking about is using the Meta Quest Pro to digitally add additional monitors into your work-from-home setup. You might have nothing more than your laptop on your desk, but the moment you put on the Meta Quest Pro, you see four monitors sitting in front of you, and these digital monitors can be used in the exact same way physical monitors can be. It's pretty cool stuff.
But this isn't the metaverse. Well, it's at least not the metaverse based on Meta's definition of playing cards in outer space with a giant visor-wearing robot. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect with how Zuckerberg is painting the metaverse in media events and how it is actually being manifested in Meta's products. If you ask Zuckerberg what his vision of the metaverse is, it seems to genuinely be all of humanity playing cards in outer space with a giant visor-wearing robot. But if you ask the Meta Quest Pro product management team what their vision of the metaverse is, it just seems to be people working with a lot of virtual monitors sitting on their desks. One is a fantasy, and one is very tactical and solution-oriented. Someone is going to at some point create a home-run AR product, and I think the company that does it will explicitly design its feature set around these very tactical, clear value-add activities. But Zuckerberg seems so infatuated with the idea of hustling a robot out of its poker money that I'm not sure he'll ever constrain his vision like this.
So maybe that's my real opinion on the metaverse: Zuckerberg's eyebrow-less card-shark fantasy is ludicrous, but the idea of incorporating more AR and mixed reality components into our personal devices is a good one, and I hope Meta has the wherewithal to focus on the latter, not the former.
תגובות