I'm a proud owner of a Meta Quest 2 VR headset. It is an amazing experience but I don't use it very often. I got it because I wanted to see what the tech was all about. I'm a professional computer guy all my life but retired now. I like to keep up with the world. Here's my take on the metaverse.
I'm a proud owner of a Meta Quest 2 VR headset. It is an amazing experience but I don't use it very often. I got it because I wanted to see what the tech was all about. I'm a professional computer guy all my life but retired now. I like to keep up with the world. Here's my take on the metaverse.
As I said, it is an amazing experience but it has so far to go before it has any chance of being a place where we live a large part of our lives. The metaverse is populated by apps and games that mostly don't talk to each other. Each one uses the interface and visuals differently. There's not much commonality between them at all. This means there is a metaverse for each app/game. Not at all the promise of the metaverse. I'm not complaining. This is really how it will always be. If I'm shooting aliens on another planet, I don't care about a common interface. The specific interface of the game is an important part of the experience.
The metaverse (or metaverses) are searching for those areas of commonality and it is going to be a decade before we start to see where it is really going to go. Although we might expect Meta workers to embrace the tech more, they aren't that much different from regular folk. The management (and, perhaps, most of the workers) know that we are in an exploratory phase. It is time to throw stuff on the wall, see what sticks, and occasionally clean and repaint the wall in its entirety.
Meta has also realized that there is a professional market for VR which explains why their next headset is much more expensive and capable than the one I have. An early pro VR application was Boeing using them to aid workers in routing the miles of cable involved in assembling an airliner. Via a VR headset, the worker could literally see exactly where each cable goes, making the process go much faster and with fewer mistakes. I suspect we will find a huge number of applications for pro VR. Meta might make a lot of money off this and, at the same time, advance the software in an exploratory way.
In short, the VR world will be fantastic someday but I have no idea what it'll look like when we get there.
I'm a proud owner of a Meta Quest 2 VR headset. It is an amazing experience but I don't use it very often. I got it because I wanted to see what the tech was all about. I'm a professional computer guy all my life but retired now. I like to keep up with the world. Here's my take on the metaverse.
As I said, it is an amazing experience but it has so far to go before it has any chance of being a place where we live a large part of our lives. The metaverse is populated by apps and games that mostly don't talk to each other. Each one uses the interface and visuals differently. There's not much commonality between them at all. This means there is a metaverse for each app/game. Not at all the promise of the metaverse. I'm not complaining. This is really how it will always be. If I'm shooting aliens on another planet, I don't care about a common interface. The specific interface of the game is an important part of the experience.
The metaverse (or metaverses) are searching for those areas of commonality and it is going to be a decade before we start to see where it is really going to go. Although we might expect Meta workers to embrace the tech more, they aren't that much different from regular folk. The management (and, perhaps, most of the workers) know that we are in an exploratory phase. It is time to throw stuff on the wall, see what sticks, and occasionally clean and repaint the wall in its entirety.
Meta has also realized that there is a professional market for VR which explains why their next headset is much more expensive and capable than the one I have. An early pro VR application was Boeing using them to aid workers in routing the miles of cable involved in assembling an airliner. Via a VR headset, the worker could literally see exactly where each cable goes, making the process go much faster and with fewer mistakes. I suspect we will find a huge number of applications for pro VR. Meta might make a lot of money off this and, at the same time, advance the software in an exploratory way.
In short, the VR world will be fantastic someday but I have no idea what it'll look like when we get there.