Is the Metaverse Dead?

What is the Metaverse? " The Metaverse is a poorly build video game" said the CEO of Microsoft Gaming in the video interview you will find below.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, has decided to?bury?his ambitious project, the?Metaverse and redirect his attention towards Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The?Metaverse?was supposed to be the next big thing for Zuckerberg, but it has now been quietly?shelved?indefinitely.

Reality Labs, the division?responsible?for the?Metaverse?projects, recorded a cumulative?loss?of nearly?$26 billion?in 2021 and 2022, which has likely contributed to Zuckerberg's decision to shift the company's focus.

"We're creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area," Zuckerberg said in a?Feb. 27?post on Facebook.

"We're starting by pulling together a lot of the teams working on generative AI across the company into one group focused on building delightful experiences around this technology. ...

"In the short term, we'll focus on building creative and expressive tools," he wrote. "Over the longer term, we'll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways."

He is sparing himself humiliation by surreptitiously and deftly redirecting the attention of his critics to AI, which most experts consider a true technological revolution.

Interesting opinions given by Disney, Apple, Microsoft and many other influential companies, all put together in this video: (Watch the video in this article)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-metaverse-is-quickly-turning-into-the-meh-taverse-1a8dc3d0?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Walt Disney?Co. has shut down the division that was developing its metaverse strategies, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.?Microsoft?Corp. recently shut down a social virtual-reality platform it acquired in 2017.

This does not come as a surprise for anyone that have visited Horizon Worlds, the worlds inside the Metaverse. All you see is a dozen of these cartoon torsos floating around many of them 11 or 12-year-old children talking about how they are using their parent's Oculus while they are out or at work. You need to be 13 to register for Horizon Worlds. Another thing you will notice is that many of these worlds created by users don't even work, they are broken code, walls falling and nobody in them. What about the concerts in it? All you see are 2 or 3 people watching the concerts available.

If we look at games like Call of Duty or many others, they already have created amazing virtual worlds, so realistic that they look like the real world. The Metaverse looks like a video game made by an amateur video game developer at home. If we look at what Oculus created before it was bought by Facebook, you could see that the way to do it was, to keep that amazing team that made pretty good Virtual reality games and keep doing that. When you go from the Oculus games to the Metaverse, you wonder how they went from such amazing virtual reality games to the poor quality of the Metaverse.

But what about businesses using the Metaverse for meetings and collaborative work? Many companies invested in few thousand Oculus to introduce the future of collaboration into their companies, but did they improve collaboration and productivity? Very few companies are using them at the moment. I have been talking to many people that worked with them and they say they used them 3 or 4 times and never again. That happens with people at home, I bought the Oculus, got super excited about them, got addicted to them for 4 days and now they have been in their box for a few months now.

For Oculus to become a device used by businesses his company will need to provide hooks that can integrate existing hardware and software into the metaverse. That will mean effectively giving one of the?worst-reputed companies in the world?access to any information that users will want to project into the metaverse. Your company’s annual profit and loss figures, perhaps your employee record and salary expectations, maybe even medical records for a virtual industrial tribunal — it will all be handed to Facebook (whose rebranding has convinced no one). Whether you are a privacy advocate or even mildly interested in cybersecurity,?this should not be acceptable.

Finally, the hardware remains an issue. In twenty years, VR headsets may have been replaced by a simple pair of spectacles, or even something owing more to science fiction, like retinal and jawbone implants. But until then, donning what is essentially a motorbike helmet to chat with colleagues will not be popular.

Who are the biggest users of Oculus? Gamers, Zuckerberg should have kept it for gaming as it was when he bought the company, they were great for gaming and that is what he should have focused on. Trying to change the world from reality to the Metaverse was never going to be easy, even worse after Covid -19 because there is now more interest in reality, outdoors, and people connections out of Zoom.

A recent WSJ column entitled "The Metaverse is Quickly Turning into the Meh-taverse"?recently emphasized the current disconnect between a metaverse happening anytime soon and the newer tech industry shifts to AI instead. Indeed, if you follow tech, you know AI is now at the centre of most of the tech world's activity and has more significant potential to affect our lives now and in the future.

The metaverse idea is nothing new and it has been fighting for its existence for more than 40 years.

The idea of a virtual life has been developed for a long time too with no results.

Here you can find an article I wrote about Horizon and the history of immersive virtual worlds

The question is, now that he has left the Metaverse and moved to AI, are we waiting for a company rebrand again?

By Mili Ponce

SocialSongbird.com