Closing thoughts on Meta and VR

I previously ranted about all the interest and funding being mindlessly funnelled into Meta by people too ignorant or young to have lived through all the Second Life silliness, and it strikes me that it's easy to criticise where things are going wrong, but it's hard to advise where they should be going instead. Thus in the interests of living the values I preach, here goes my attempt to predict what will (hopefully) be obvious on 5 years time...bold talk I know, but I've been right before.....

To clearly describe my prediction, let's assume all VR can be broken down into 2 main categories :

1. Immersive - this covers all full virtual world experiences that try recreate an artificial environment, either through headsets (bonjour Meta), desktop (re-bonjour Second Life, Roblox, Simms, even Zoom)
2. Augmented - this covers any mobile apps (Google Lens, Microsoft Hololens), Musk's too-good-to-be-true contact lenses, MojoLens etc - anything that keeps the user in the real world, but attempts to super-charge human capabilities

Let's cover them each in a bit more detail.

Immersive

This is the domain of games. There have been, and will continue to be attempts to commercialise VR experiences by wannabe tech companies such as Adidas, Nike etc, desperately trying to make their 50 years old brands young and hip. But they will stumble when they discover every world in this space is a walled garden, and requires multiple individual integrations to satisfy the lure of access to those sweet sweet eyeballs, until they realise the demographic is crowded, with razor thin margins, and very underfunded. The virtual worlds will be littered with the corpses of failed marketing campaigns that fail to understand the only reason these worlds exist is to escape reality, not to inject your real marketing reality into an artificial world. Only gaming companies will make any money here, and none of them will dominate like the previous heyday of Facebook or Microsoft. Each virtual world will have their schtick, and there is space for only a handful of them. None of them will be Meta unless they are bought and consolidated forcefully.

And no-one wants to have virtual meetings in virtual worlds, so please stop it. Zoom I'm looking at you. Prediction : Immersive experiences are the domain of gaming companies, and any non-gaming applications remain novelty conference demos to excite naive investors. This tax on the naive will continue for the next decade.

Augmented

This is absolutely the future, augmented devices (wearables) such as watches, contact lenses, haptic devices are absolutely the future. People want to stay in reality, and this is where people will continue to add value. And augmenting this capability is how we supercharge humans into the next era. This is where technology finally disappears (which is the opposite of Immersive). We don't want to hold our devices and type with our thumbs. We don't want to have to stupidly shout out "Ok Google" or "Alexa play music" - we want seamless experiences that don't require us to interface clumsily with old, miniaturised versions of 1980's display technology. We want HUD, overlaying smartly and innocuously in our real worlds. We want vibrating alarms in our wrist-worn health monitors and step-counters, or bone-conducted music in our sunglasses. But humans remain the centre of creativity and all of the tech is only supportive, automating and enabling the human who is the main actor. We will see the rise of plugins for these base capabilities, like a Doctor Plugin, or Legal Plugin, that provides domain specific knowledge to the wearer - with increased ability to interface with adjacent devices (let your doctor access your sleep patterns). This will finally unlock the as yet unsolved medical record sharing problem. Temporary access on demand based on role and location. Proximity dating, instant flight checkins etc. And to link this back to my own current role, a Transport plugin, or Food plugin, to allow our customers to transparently order food, move around their city, or transact in ways that augment with every customers particular way of working. But that does not involve a silly headset and a world of people without legs.

The other missing piece in all of this is the rise of the intelligent backend and improvements in communication bandwidth. Much of Immersive and Augmented improvement is contingent on rapid bulk data processing and presentation, and with the continued miniaturisation of storage and communication components, the capabilities for augmented systems to increase the resolution and accuracy of their scope increases exponentially. The combination of large data sets, and ability to compute personalised views of those data sets is where Augmented value starts drawing away from Immersive systems.

In summary perhaps not bold predications, since it's fairly obvious where we are headed and most of my predictions are actually just reflections on current state of events.