Is the metaverse dead?
Metaverse 2.0
The metaverse has entered its flop era as tech companies switch their focus to artificial intelligence.
That’s forced venture capitalist Matthew Ball to course correct too, by slapping a new title on his 2022 book on the metaverse, according to The Verge. The book went from a hyperbolic and prophetic-sounding title of “The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything,” to the far more prosaic and circumspect, “Building the Spatial Internet.”
And yet, Ball told The Verge during a recent podcast interview promoting his updated book that the world is still headed towards the metaverse — though, he concedes, it’ll arrive in fits and starts.
Technologies like Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are stepping stones towards that future, while video game companies like Roblox and Epic Games, the developer behind Fortnite, are working on advancing various concepts that could lead to a future metaverse with mass appeal, Ball said.
Another Bite
And don’t count out Apple just yet.
While the Vision Pro is “very far off for the average person,” Ball told the Verge, the tech giant has filed something like 5,000 research and development patents connected with the headset, representing 25 percent of all Apple patents since 2015.
“It’s important to recognize how much Apple has spent on this device,” Ball added, estimating that the tech company poured $135 million into the Vision Pro.
All that work, investment, and the thousands of patents will lead to some sort of metaverse, which may be called something else entirely in the future, Ball said. (Sales for the pricey headset have fallen off a cliff since its release.)
Touch Grass
But there are still a lot of questions about security and privacy that the interview with Ball doesn’t cover.
Dealing with some version of the metaverse, whether it’s virtual or augmented or mixed, entails giving up privacy to corporations.
We’ve already given up so much personal data — willingly or unwillingly — to tech companies, which don’t exactly have a great track record on how they use this information. Along with revelations on how AI models have been trained, there’s now lots of deserved skepticism towards Big Tech from many people.
Also, imagine having your whole life linked to a huge online world, and the whole thing breaks down because the corporation running it is hacked or a software update has a hidden glitch, making people lose untold amounts of money. The recent Microsoft-CrowdStrike outage is a perfect cautionary tale.
With all these possible dangers, maybe the safest way to engage with the metaverse is to just unplug and go outside.
More on the metaverse: There’s an Interesting Theory About Why Zuckerberg Wasted Billions on the Metaverse
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