There was an article on BBC news the other day about people investing in property in the metaverse. It blew my mind because it's not a finite space like the real world... the idea that people are spending thousands speculating on virtual real estate in an unproven environment that has almost zero uptake is mind blowing.

It's not a scam, it's a Hail Mary play to control the platform that Facebook's services run on. Without that control, it's at the mercy of upstream vendors.

It's not going to work, but there's a good reason for why they are trying.

Second Life was just another window in your computer. VR (or AR, XR, etc.) is new hardware paradigm for displaying stuff.

Edit: not really "new" – first AR/VR display was in 1968 by Ivan Sutherland, but current tech allows us to have standalone device with good ergonomics and plenty of performance

Or VRChat, which does everything Meta is trying to do years ago