People want to experiment. They want to voice things they normally wouldn't. They want to ask their boss or an in law to help them in Farmville. Or poke that dreamy former classmate. It's a little like those parties where they put masks on but everyone knows who the person under the mask is.
Forums are an outlet, sort of like what we do on HN with the linked usernames and stuff. But forums limit you to text. There's a spatial aspect too. As a kid, I used to try to make a chatroom where you could fling snowballs at each other, except some of those snowballs had rocks, and some dude would come in with a flamethrower. There were rules, but they were not that restrictive, and these avatars were an extension of your identity. It's this ridiculousness, that Minecraft/Roblox/Second Life all understand. There's also lots of MU* and MUSHes for this kind of thing.
I don't believe FB/Meta really understands this though, just the way they've failed to understand why Snap and TikTok are working. FB of today is great at imitating. They have the infrastructure skill and the technical talent but not the soul. They'll probably try to copy Roblox and they'll get some traction because they have such a huge platform, but it'll likely be something that sets the bottom bar.
My view is that it’ll have a deep impact on a small population. VR goggles are still expensive, bulky, and far from providing a “reality-like” experience, especially on the fov front. There is a massive barrier to putting something on your face. 3D movies were to be the next big thing. A lot of TVs ship with 3D displays, but do you know anyone who is actually putting the glasses on to watch anything? So I personally don’t expect to see a wide adoption to this.
However some people are likely to enjoy VR a lot. I think a good number of people will get sucked in, black mirror style, cause the escapism it provides is awesome. And facebook is well known for optimizing for “time spent in the app”. So I think people who are lonely or depressed will get to find some social life in the metaverse. It’s something that happened in SL, WoW and all other online worlds. Now Facebook being Facebook, it also means that it won’t do much to prevent extremist groups from recruiting online and try to generate profit from it.
The way I see it, is that the metaverse is going to be a place where lonely people go socialize, and where gurus and extremists pay for finding and brainwashing those people. Sort of “brainwashable-people-as-a-service”.
The 3D creator population is expanding. The tools are better and the use cases are expanding. So yes, to your point, existing assets.
Then there is the hardware, as you've pointed out. This makes all that content slightly more user friendly and available at a lower barrier of entry to the average user.
Then there must be a network that brings users together. Certainly seems like Facebook had capability for this area.
Will it be controlled by Meta? Too soon to say IMO, but they have capacity and expertise for two of the three requirements in my (overly simple) mental model. I suspect the Web3/DAO crowd has a pretty strong opinion here. My two cents is we'll have at least two primary metaverse-like networks of users (one more closed, one more open).. but likely more.
Disclaimer: I work at Thangs.com, which is a 3D search and collaboration platform. So I have obvious biases which lead me to assume there will be a more open metaverse in the future.
Of course not. Rarely if ever do revolutions come from on high or on purpose let along both of them together.
20 years ago I asked a philosophy student for a list of Baudrillard books and I got all of them except for this one
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22617.Seduction
which was a mistake because when I read it a few months ago I understood what computers really mean and what I've been doing with them all these years.
Something happened to me like something out of a comic book a few months ago and I manifested an evil twin who had dark triad characteristics.
My evil twin set a trap for someone based on the ideas in that book (plus Robert Greene and Søren Kierkegaard.) They got away, but I realized that I could seduce someone without fail if I could become the environment.
People have been talking about virtual reality since Plato and the idea of virtual reality informs literature and art not to mention computing. When I tell somebody who does logistics for a big discount score I want to learn queuing theory they tell me "just simulate it on a computer"
Another theme people miss is augmented reality as a location-based service experienced through smartphones. Those QR codes on restaurant menus are the thin edge of a very long wedge. Objects that are half-digital and half-physical are outright easy: in my house you can scan a QR code and get a user interface to control the IoT gadgets.
At one level I scoff at the "metaverse", I think it's got very little relevance for Facebook and it's problems today because it is going to take 10 years to materialize. Facebook might capture 10% of the value.
Funny though I have side projects sequenced like Mercury, Gemini and Apollo and they are all metaverse-ready. (and were metaverse ready this summer)
The best thing Facebook has going for it is that it has good and affordable headsets. I am shopping for a VR headset to support the software development I'm doing and it looks like I'd have to spend $1500 to get the system I want outside the Facebook ecosystem. If I could bear to log in with a Facebook account it would be more like $800, but I deleted my Facebook account years ago.
Meta may be seemingly laughable currently - but assuming the consumerism lifestyle can continue without collapse, grooming ~20% of the global population as they grow, into artificially desiring a more immersive experience during the critical growth years where the effects socio-psychological dopamine pathways are formed, ideally with these formative interactions happening in more-and-more virtual 'metas'...
But I don't think it will win. It would have won had the global stability in almost every pillar of our civilization appears to be de-materializing in front of us.
(1) Buckminister Fuller told us we had a choice between Utopia and Oblivion but it is hard to go wrong with the assumption that civilization will muddle through. (And that is speaking as someone who has been seriously anti-systemic at times, believed in the "oil peak" in 2001, etc.)
(2) Kids are not going to be the early adopters of the metaverse. To the contrary, the people who buy expensive toys are middle aged men. There are indications that (much) older people like VR just fine if they find the content compelling.
It's true Facebook has trouble attracting and holding on to young people, but there are many parts of the narrative I don't believe, particularly the idea that young people are an attractive audience to advertise to.
Maybe in 1970 getting a child interested in Joe Camel would lead to a lifetime of smoking, but a child that was exposed to Camel or Lucky Strike as a brand in 2010 is either vaping or smoking pot today. Turn on a TV right now and the thing you see advertised the most right now is "Medicare Advantage" plans for people over 65. People will make excuses like "you just aren't looking in the right places" but the fact is that young people don't have a lot of money and businesses struggle to look ahead far enough to cultivate consumers who will be spending 10-20 years from now.
Thus the metaverse is a 10-year mission to bamboozle people about Facebook's next quarter.