Forward the Metaverse ?

A couple of recent articles prompt a quick check-in regarding the progress (or lack thereof) about the metaverse. You might want to read this post first so I can avoid repeating myself. 

First, this one has some intriguing news about upcoming hardware releases. 

With regards to the VR roadmap, employees were told that Meta’s flagship Quest 3 headset coming later this year will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and cost slightly more than the $400 Quest 2. Like the recently announced Quest Pro, it will prominently feature mixed reality experiences that don’t fully immerse the wearer, thanks to front-facing cameras that pass through video of the real world. 

“The main north star for the team was from the moment you put on this headset, the mixed reality has to make it feel better, easier, more natural,” he said. “You can walk effortlessly through your house knowing you can see perfectly well. You can put anchors and things on your desktop. You can take your coffee. You can stay in there much longer.”

This would be a significant development, to the point I'd be wondering if I should upgrade my Quest 1. Recall that, in my opinion, the potential for widespread adoption of mixed reality is all about thresholds, and right now, the threshold for convenience isn't that great. You have to prepare yourself for VR as though you were going for a short hike. You can't just slap on the headset and go but have to define boundaries, prepare a clear space, and if you're using a PC you have to set up a wireless link (woe betide you if you're using a cable, poor fool !). Sure, things have progressed leaps and bounds, but this is still a significant burden. 

And I would stress that the Quest 3, like the Quest Pro, is still only a step forwards. Compare the situation to gravitational wave detectors. Each incremental advanced increased the sensitivity a little bit, but only when a critical threshold was breached did this have any real consequences. The Quest 3 is another step along that road : necessary, but not the final goal.

More intriguing is that something more like the final product necessary for true metaverse immersion does seem to be in the works :

Meta’s first true pair of AR glasses, which the company has been internally developing for 8 years under the codename Orion, are more technically advanced, expensive, are designed to project high-quality holograms of avatars onto the real world. There will be an “internal launch” for employees to test the glasses in 2024, according to Himel. A version won’t be released to the public until 2027, when Meta will launch what Himel called its “Innovation” line of AR glasses for early adopters alongside a “Scale” line of the less advanced smart glasses and the second generation of its neural smartwatch.

So, basically in keeping with my original post, mixed reality as a normal experience towards the end of this decade doesn't seem implausible. If, that is, Meta can figure out a sensible business model, which given their recent troubles does seem to be giving them some grief.

Now last time I said that the hardware development might be more important than the software, but I think I'm going to revise my opinion a little here. The "if you build it they will come" approach is not correct. Rather it should be they can come. You've got to cross that technological barrier for a metaverse to even be possible, but that by no means guarantees that it will actually happen.

There will be 41 new apps and games shipping for the Quest 3, including new mixed reality experiences to take advantage of the updated hardware, Rabkin said. 

Which is good because it's a running joke in the Quest community that they'll be offering the same games in ten years as they are now. Development of new apps and games is absurdly slow, and the Quest apps do an appallingly bad job of promoting new ones (except for flagship projects) when they do appear. Kudos to them for having the "App Lab" that means developers can realise projects which don't meet their full standards, but they do a lousy job of promoting this.

The situation is perhaps akin to HD TV. HD content is undeniably better than SD, but if there's nothing to watch, the technology is pointless. On then to the second article :

So if you look at the Quest 2, which most people use for playing games, as a game console, it’s done reasonably well. And I think we do need to look at it as a gaming console. Meta might have big ambitions for VR headsets and their place in the metaverse, but the reality is that the top software on the Quest 2 are all games. VR early adopters in the consumer space buy headsets to play games. Devices like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and the PSVR (which sold around 5 million headsets by 2020) were adopted by consumers to play video games, not dick around in a barely built metaverse.

And the push for the Quest 2 to be a metaverse device hasn’t especially resonated with consumers. Rabkin told staff that “sadly, the newer cohorts that are coming in, the people who bought it this last Christmas, they’re just not as into it” as the early adopters. Those early adopters were eager to play games, and that’s what they saw when they slipped the headset on. New users are seeing ads for stuff like Horizon Worlds, which, again, is such a mess even the people who make it don’t want to play it.

And while Meta is thrusting metaverse experiences onto users, it’s kind of ignoring that core gamer audience and not doing a whole lot to build it. Beat Saber, arguably VR’s killer app, is four years old, and no other VR game has really captured the zeitgeist in a similar fashion.. Steam and Sony are both very aware that killer AAA game experiences are necessary for a VR platform. That’s why we’ve got excellent titles like Half-Life: Alyx and Horizon Call of the Mountain. They’re invested in the software as much as the hardware. Meta isn’t.

I don't see the appeal of Beat Saber myself but the point stands. Meta is building a series of improving games consoles but forgetting to provide any content for them. Fair enough that the ultimate goal isn't gaming but something much more far-reaching. But to get there, you've got to give people a hook. And  the games developed by Oculus Studios were very, very good, whereas the avatars that Meta are coming out with are just so soullessly corporate that nobody who's actually not a robot is ever likely to use them.

Personally I stand by my long-running opinion that they should focus on the headsets as an interface. Have all the heavy work done by an external PC or other device; that's ultimately what AR glasses are surely going to have do anyway. Focus on getting extremely good wireless access to said device and market them as being able to play all your favourite games in A/VR. Right now, gaming is pretty much all they're good for. Yes, routine productivity will be possible eventually, but it isn't right now*. So yeah, aim for the metaverse, but provide gaming and social events as the means by which you'll get there.

* There are some diehard fans who swear the few "productivity" apps which do exist are genuinely useful, but personally I think the sheer cumbersomeness of the headeset (and the low resolution), combined with the lack of mixed reality, makes this a complete non-started right now. They're enough to demonstrate future potential but nothing more than that.

I remain convinced that VR is far more than a gimmick; the potential for such devices as being equivalent in prevalence to mobile phones is very real. But we're not quite living in that future yet, and the road to it is (as should be expected) a bumpy one. Still, that Quest 3 is sounding pretty tempting...