The cover of Time magazine’s special issue focusing on Davos, 2023.
Courtney Harding
In January 2023, I stepped off a train in Davos, Switzerland, to speak and help launch a program called Whose Metaverse. Within five minutes of arriving at my hotel, someone handed me the special commemorative issue of Time Magazine, which featured various World Economic Forum dignitaries wearing virtual reality headsets and the slogan “Davos Meets the Metaverse.” Whose Metaverse launch event praised Semaphore and mocked by Shale; the board was packed and the buzz was loud. The metaverse was the wave of the future, the way we would interact and communicate, the next wave of social media. Headphones enabled, avatars created, activated and ready to use.
A little less than three years later, Bloomberg reports that Meta plans to cut 30% of its Reality Labs team next year. Google and Samsung released a handset and immediately stopped talking about it. The Apple Vision Pro lives on, but it’s nowhere near the adoption curve of other Apple products after launch. Many of the original creators of virtual reality and aftershocks have focused on work in other fields. those who were hanged struggle.
What went so wrong? How did the company that basically created modern social networking mess up the second iteration so completely? And what does the future hold for spatial computing and virtual reality given this news?
Timing is everything
As bleak as it sounds, the pandemic should have been a golden opportunity for the metaverse and virtual reality. People were stuck at home and bored and desperate for connectivity – perfect market conditions for this technology. But Meta’s timing was a bit off and that was enough to miss the boat. While Horizon Worlds was announced in 2019, it only went into beta in August 2020, once the initial lockdowns had passed. Those lost few months were critical and unfortunately unrecoverable. Add to this that when it was released in beta, senior executives raised concerns that it wasn’t ready for primetime, and wider release was delayed until late 2021.
But the other, arguably bigger issue was that the entire Meta strategy was muddled from day one, with endless twists and turns when it came to the overall strategic vision. They would start funds, hire creators, have a clear vision – and then drop everything a year later and do something new. They were all into gaming, at appropriatenessin education and trainingin “lifestyle“, at The creators of Horizon Worlds – until it wasn’t. And instead of hiring outside VR experts and creators, Meta promoted from within. Unfortunately, in my experience, that meant senior leaders and decision makers who had never worn a headset. Creators were sidelined and not supported while growing headset sales and adoption.
Welcome to the Emptyverse
In 2022, when everyone was building post-war worlds, Wendy’s released the “the Wendyverse.” It received some decent coverage in the ad trades and an announcement within the Meta, but immediately fell off a cliff in terms of attendance and attention. Because while it looked great, it couldn’t answer one simple question: why would anyone visit? No effort was made to create or manage a community and encourage people to visit multiple times to hang out. It was purely an exercise so an executive could tell his boss he was on the hot metaverse trend. Wendy’s wasn’t the only company to do this either – banks and shoe companies were building worlds, without much success.
What’s worse is that it could have been great. In 2020, when Burning Man was canceled, a group of technical burners got together and built BRCVRa digital twin of the playa. They captured the spirit of the event while allowing users to do things they could never do in real life, like fly to different camps. It became a hangout and gathering point and lived long after the canards were removed because organizers set about building community and giving people reasons to come back and continue exploring.
This is the potential and ultimately the lost promise of the metaverse – a digital third space where you could incarnate with your friends, play games, do fun things, and keep coming back. Social media feels like a giant, screaming attention-gap right now, and that’s how it used to be, when you could just hang out with your friends from all over the world. The success of platforms like Roblox has shown that there is a market for it, and Meta could have taken Facebook’s playbook and made it something for a mass audience.
Bloomberg reports that Meta will reallocate resources to continue building AI products, because of course. It’s an open question how much Meta will continue to invest in headsets and smart glasses, though signs point to continued growth in glasses at least.
Will the metaverse make a comeback in some form? There are some reasons to be optimistic – people still crave connection in a lonely age, and AI avatars could lead to personalized games and social experiences that many people may want to use. Let’s just hope whoever takes up the mantle next learns from Meta’s mistakes.
