Metaverse is here?
There’s a lot of buzz these days on Metaverse. However, apart from something that triggered an expensive branding exercise, what exactly is it?
Let’s start with a very crude version of Metaverse - meeting new people online.
To that extent, most of the new romantic relationships formed are already there.
Even otherwise, Myspace and Facebook realised this vision much earlier.
Now let’s stretch the definition to include conversing online. So now you have everyone from Twitter to Whatsapp to Discord to Clubhouse here.
Let’s include doing stuff together online. Now you add more variety - gaming through Fortnite and Roblox, collaborative work through Google Docs and Slack.
Notice that so far, the evolution of metaverse has been fairly linear.
So what’s next?
Metaverse was originally coined in a 1992 novel called Snow Crash. In the novel, the protagonist Hiro, a recluse in real life, had a completely different personality online, with his jazzy avatar and multi-colored glasses. One of the key elements of the story is that a person like Hiro could be whoever he wanted in this alternate universe.
So, metaverse is not just about doing things, but about being someone different.
An innate human desire is to be looked at a certain way, a way that is conjured up in the head of a person, may or may not be real, but the sentiment associated with that identity is real. Someone wants to be looked as pretty, vs someone bold, vs someone smart etc.
Metaverse, in its latest definition, represents that feeling of being someone, and enables it.
To that extent, the physical and virtual worlds will be increasingly different.
Ben Thompson writes on similar lines in The Great Bifurcation:
the physical world and digital world are increasingly bifurcating. Again, to use myself as an example, my physical reality is defined by my life in Taiwan with my family; the majority of my time and energy, though, is online, defined by interactions with friends, co-workers, and customers scattered all over the world.
How will the worlds be different?
Let’s study the traits of the physical world a bit more deeply.
The first limitation is that it’s limited by presence. You have to be physically present in a situation to experience it.
Second, resources are actually scarce in the real world. There’s limited land, minerals etc. This further induces downstream limitations on how fast we can travel, communicate, etc.
Pros of virtual world
Virtual world removes the need for presence, as you can simulate being wherever you want. This is especially advantageous for people whose physical world environments aren’t great.
Our environment shapes a lot of our moods. A frequent advice for uplifting moods if you are in the same room for a while, is to go out and take a walk, or meet a friend etc. One of those endeavors is being immersed in your phone, traversing through Instagram, Twitter or else.
However, the current version of ‘doing stuff’ online is not completely immersive in the way taking a walk outside does. It does not take you away from your context, just your eyes.
This divide is also a reason for the mental health issues a lot of us face in wfh context. Our body is a unified piece, it’s very hard for us to be constantly in a different context in mind, while our body is in a different context. Across the millenia, we have learnt to be one with the environment, its elements and actors (animals or people).
2-D laptops and mobiles cause this dissonance.
Human societies, pre literacy, were oral and auditory societies. Tribes communicated mainly by speech, and inscriptions were only used to count or make images. Then, alphabetic text and printing press led to literacy, which absorbed information through visual sense. This over-index on visual sense removed the individual away from the environment. So in a way, books have been the earliest medium for escapism. Earlier internet, which was predominantly text based, accelerated this dissonance. However, the advent of video and audio based communication made this escape a bit immersive.
This mode is still not completely immersive, since you ultimately interact in 2D even for actual 3D content (e.g. video calls). This sacrifices the feeling of ‘being there’.
Enter VR! Instead of just your eyes, take your physical avatar (or a part of it) in a different context.
There are different form factors possible for VR also, but I’ll talk about two:
Oculus
Project Starline
Most of the focus so far has been on the first one. Quest 2 has made the most progress there, with strong positive reviews so far. However, there are still problems including heavy headsets, feelings of dizziness, spatial audio, and 3d video rendering. Over time though, some of these problems will be solved (is the hope).
Google, after its failures with Cardboard, is experimenting with a different form factor
The mobility is of course restricted here, but the experience might turn out to be better - at least there’s no dizziness here and much more elements of the existing world being incorporated. Too early to tell though.
Where does AR fall in the picture then ?
VR is about escaping the environment completely, AR is about tweaking it. In that sense, the dissonance is lesser in AR. Which is also a part of the reason why more people have been bullish on AR than VR, and its adoption has also been faster. However, for those who truly want an escape, AR wont suffice. So just like the advent of video did not kill audio as a format, AR and VR will also exist simultaneously.
There has been a lot of buzz around these technologies, mainly because of how cool they are. So why have they not taken off so far?
Multiple reasons:
The problems with VR headsets as a form factor as outlined above
No strong consumer use-case for adoption. The adoption of VR before Quest2 has been mostly in industrial training. With Quest2, gaming and fitness comes into play, but it’s still a hobbyist’s playground.
AR lenses are already big in content creation, through Snapchat, Tiktok etc. There’s also usage seen in furniture shopping etc (e.g. augment your room with a Sofa). Apart from these, the use-cases are few. Also because only a few use-cases can work when you use your phone camera to see through the reality. Glasses as a form factor work much better, which is going to be Snap Spectacles’ and Apple’s bet as well.
The hardware penetration will grow only through the demand of strong use-cases, not just toys. And that is yet to be figured out by the industry. There are other ‘boring’ problems also that will come up if VR actually becomes mainstream - e.g. how do you verify identities? What will be the regulations? etc. But those are much farther away. Let’s solve the utility question first.
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