there wouldn’t have been any upside for me if Meta’s Metaverse had succeeded. What remains to be seen is whether there’s a downside for me now that it has failed.
Stephenson offers some good advice to future attempts to make a metaverse, starting with:
This one resonates strongly with me. Stephenson goes on to say:
Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.
Stephenson almost gets to the point of suggesting that Facebook's metaverse failed because it was too centralized:
Typically, headset software can’t run - it can’t even boot up - without a connection to servers that make the whole integrated system work.
But he backs off before saying as much, and ends up saying the more obvious thing: metaverses in stories always have something big and exciting going on because they are set inside plots. But the metaverse in this world has no plot:
Having built it, though, you might discover that it’s just a lot of randos milling around waiting for something to happen.
Where Stephenson ends is that we already have a metaverse; it just doesn't have goggles - and isn't likely to anytime soon:
Roblox has something like 380 million monthly active users. Minecraft has something like 60 million. Fortnite has 650 million registered players. These (and others mentioned in the Tim Sweeney tweet above) are all virtual three-dimensional spaces where you can run around in an avatar and interact with faraway persons over the Internet. The only thing that differentiates them from the Metaverse, as narrowly construed by Metaverse-tombstone-cartoon-posting halfwits, is that no goggles are involved.
Wearing goggles may be a bridge too far for life in the metaverse. People seem entirely happy to spend all day every day on their device, but goggles take a lot of fun out of it. Perhaps Stephenson should write a new novel called Screens.
Stephenson offers some good advice to future attempts to make a metaverse, starting with:
This one resonates strongly with me. Stephenson goes on to say:
Stephenson almost gets to the point of suggesting that Facebook's metaverse failed because it was too centralized:
But he backs off before saying as much, and ends up saying the more obvious thing: metaverses in stories always have something big and exciting going on because they are set inside plots. But the metaverse in this world has no plot:
Where Stephenson ends is that we already have a metaverse; it just doesn't have goggles - and isn't likely to anytime soon:
Wearing goggles may be a bridge too far for life in the metaverse. People seem entirely happy to spend all day every day on their device, but goggles take a lot of fun out of it. Perhaps Stephenson should write a new novel called Screens.