Facebook, now Meta, wants to pivot into virtual reality. But it won’t be able to escape its sins.
Facebook is trying to shuck off its reputation for manipulating elections and destroying societies by becoming « Meta, » the Metaverse company. We have an explainer on the metaverse, but in short, a metaverse is a persistent, open virtual- or augmented-reality platform. Metaverses have existed for decades; Second Life once had a million users. Meta, of course, wants to take that from the millions to the billions. Everyone involved in 5G is betting on metaverses, too. Qualcomm calls its approach « XR, » or extended reality. Microsoft calls it « MR, » mixed reality. T-Mobile’s President of Technology Neville Ray told me that » eyewear wearables » could be the killer consumer app for true 5G, and that’s how you get into the metaverse. There’s a big difference between Facebook’s metaverse and the one the 5G players want. It’s important, and it goes to why Facebook’s vision is so grimly dystopian. But the 5G metaverse is also reliant on technologies that are years away. They exist, on paper, but the process of actually building them is going to be long, difficult, and expensive. AR vs. VR vs. MR vs. XR Facebook’s metaverse dreams seem largely dependent on VR, which takes people out of their bodies and places and puts them in a virtual space. So many science-fiction dystopias have been based on this. So many. This is Ready Player One; this is Wall-E; this is The Matrix. VR is where people let their bodies rot and the world crumble around them as they try to escape into a wholly owned corporate cocoon. For some video games and the occasional Zoom meeting, it’s great, but the more you use it the more terrifying it gets. I’ve always taken the (possibly controversial?) position that we are physical bodies in the world, and to totally deny that is perilous. So the VR focus is, in my mind, a big strike-one against Facebook’s metaverse vision.
