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A reality check for the metaverse is coming

This article was originally posted on site: The Economist

Is it really the next big thing? Watch this virtual space.

 

The consumer internet and the smartphone boom, the consumer-computing industry is past due its Next Big Thing. The coming year will see big tech firms doubling down on two related, much-hyped possibilities. One is virtual- (vr) and augmented-reality (ar) headsets; the idea that, having shrunk computers into our pockets, the next step is to strap them to our faces. The other is the metaverse, which holds that an internet which is still largely flat—based on two-dimensional text, images and video—is ripe for replacement with one that is three-dimensional and immersive, experienced as a sort of globe-spanning video game.

Consider first the headsets, which are a small but growing market. IDC, a firm of analysts, reckons around 11m were sold in 2021, with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, accounting for around two-thirds of sales. The firm is expected to release several new products in the coming months. On October 11th it launched its latest headset, the Meta Quest Pro. At $1,499 it is far pricier than any of the firm’s existing offerings, but cheaper, more mainstream devices are likely to follow in 2023.

The Meta Quest Pro is capable of ar as well as vr. Whereas vr acts like a digital blindfold, immersing users in a computer-generated world, ar involves painting useful information onto a user’s view of the real world—something that is much harder, which may explain the higher price. Meta will have fresh competition, too. Apple, the world’s biggest smartphone-maker, is likely to release its first attempt at an ar/vr headset in 2023 (one guess puts the probable price at $3,000). Sony, whose PlayStation vr gaming headset, launched in 2016 and has sold over 5m units, will also release an upgraded model.

Meta’s ambition is not just to produce vr hardware but also to build the sort of virtual worlds that, it hopes, vr users will want to inhabit. The firm’s new name is a reflection of its focus on the idea of the metaverse, a shift announced by Mark Zuckerberg, its boss, in 2021. It has since spent more than $27bn on the idea and has trailed pictures of users, or their computer-generated avatars, working and playing in friendly, cartoonish 3d environments that range from boxing rings to virtual meeting-rooms. But many analysts are sceptical, particularly as Meta’s share price has slumped.

Rival firms have similar ambitions, however. Rival tech giants, such as Microsoft and Nvidia, have trumpeted their own metaverse ambitions. Industries from advertising to banking have jumped aboard, too. But the industry that is furthest along is the video-games business, which has been selling virtual worlds for decades. Epic Games has already held live-music gigs and tie-ins with films inside “Fortnite”, its popular online shooter game. Some have attracted tens of thousands of virtual revellers. Unity, which, like Epic, makes a video-game “engine” that software developers can use to power their games, has experimented with concerts of its own, and is experimenting with the 3d broadcasting of sports events.

For now, a spirit of co-operation reigns. Microsoft announced in October 2022 that it would make its Windows operating system, as well as its business-focused apps, and games written for its Xbox games consoles, available within Meta’s virtual worlds. And almost every big firm in Silicon Valley has joined the Metaverse Standards Forum (msf), which commits them to open, interoperable technical standards, so that an avatar designed for use in one company’s virtual world should work without trouble in another’s. (A notable exception is Apple, which has long prioritised keeping users within its own “walled garden” over compatibility with other firms’ products.) In 2023 the msf’s progress, or lack of it, will be one way to gauge whether the metaverse is an idea that has legs. It remains to be seen whether the collaborative spirit of the msf will survive if metaverse-based services start to make serious amounts of money.

No one is quite sure whether vrar or the metaverse is really the future of computing. Sceptics point out that such ideas are not new. Consumer vr headsets date back to the 1990s. Smartphones already have ar apps that rely on a screen rather than a headset, such as automatic text-translation programs.

But overnight revolutions are not how technology works. Apple did not invent the smartphone out of thin air. It perfected a formula that its competitors had been working on for years, in the form of BlackBerry phones and Palm handhelds, for instance. That does not guarantee that the companies piling into these trendy technologies will succeed. But it shows why they are trying.

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