My Prodigal Brainchild
Reflections on the latest and greatest Death of the Metaverse
It feels incumbent upon me to write something about last week’s big news in which the company formerly known as Facebook decided to shut down its Metaverse project on which it has, according to various reports, spent eighty billion dollars.
I spelled that figure out because it’s more zeroes and commas than I can type in before blowing through my attention span and losing track.
This event has unleashed yet another spate of Internet cartoons depicting tombstones with the word METAVERSE chiseled into them, a genre that comes and goes every few years. Here’s one from three years ago that prompted a tweet from Tim Sweeney:
I am, thank God, curiously detached from all this. Four and a half years ago I was minding my own business, cutting metal in my machine shop, when I received a text message from John Gaeta, a former colleague at Magic Leap, reading simply “Sorry for your loss.” At first I thought that he’d sent it to me mistakenly, but after a bit of Googling I became aware that Facebook had changed its name and announced that it was now going to build the Metaverse.
In retrospect, John’s message was prescient, since it marked the moment when the Metaverse really did break free and become my alienated, prodigal brainchild.
In the following weeks I had to make a few Tweets trying to convince incredulous strangers that I had no connection with what Meta was up to; that they hadn’t communicated with me in any way; that they hadn’t paid me off; and that, no, I wasn’t going to sue them. All of these things remain true.
So 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. I think I’m standing clear of the blast radius, but seeing the front page of the New York Times’s business page dominated by the inevitable Metaverse tombstone image does give one pause.
Since this is now water under the bridge, here is some free advice to future companies who might become interested in this topic when the tombstone cartoons fade once again from memory and the concept becomes hot again.
The basic idea is obvious. Consider picking a different name
Once you have computers that can show graphics, and an Internet, the notion of creating a virtual online space where users go around in audiovisual bodies (avatars) is sort of obvious . Such a thing existed at least once before I wrote Snow Crash, in the form of Habitat, and would have been independently invented over and over again had the book never existed. All I did was make up a name for it, and put it in a novel that got read by a lot of techies. And the novel had a plot - a topic I will return to at the end of this post.
People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do
When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.
Reader, I have changed my mind. 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.
A possible workaround is to keep refining and miniaturizing the devices to the point where they just look like eyeglasses. This, however, turns out to have the unintended side effect of making these things seem sinister. It happened with Google Glass, which instantaneously spawned the term “glasshole,” and it has happened again with Meta’s product that looks like normal, albeit heavy-framed glasses.
When someone around you is staring at a rectangle in their hand, it might be incredibly annoying, but at least you can tell they’re doing it. When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not.
Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it’s creepy.
It was never about goggles
Goggles were the ubiquitous visual signature of Cyberpunk. This, combined with the amount of R & D that has been poured into making various head-mounted displays by tech companies over the last couple of decades, has forged an unbreakable connection in many people’s minds between the Metaverse and goggles.
In 1990, when I was writing Snow Crash, we experienced all computer graphics through massive, heavy CRTs with terrible resolution. The images were flickery and blurry. Rendering pictures of three-dimensional scenes was in its infancy. It seemed entirely reasonable to think that the future would be all about head-mounted displays that could render stereoscopic (simulated three-dimensional) imagery.
This is not actually what happened. The feedback loop between Moore’s Law, the Internet, GUIs and video games brought us to where we are now: thanks to modern graphics cards and game engines, you can bring 3D worlds to vivid life on a cheap flat panel screen. Billions of people have access to such screens and are comfortable navigating through those worlds. There is no business case for headsets any more.
Why do big companies like Apple and Meta keep making them, then? I guess because they see a market for hardware. Particularly in the case of Apple, it’s obvious that existing hardware platforms like the iPhone are fully mature and that most people are only going to buy new ones every few years. What could induce customers to rush back into the market and buy completely new hardware? Headsets?
If you build it, they won’t come
Magic Leap did an exceptionally good job of bringing in creative talent with an eye toward building experiences sufficiently interesting to make ordinary people want to buy such devices. Even then it wasn’t enough. Which isn’t a knock on Magic Leap; this stuff is hard, and it must be a devilish balancing act trying to split finite capital between hardware and software development.
While I haven’t tracked other such projects closely, I don’t think any other headset-making company has come close to Magic Leap when it comes to supporting development of original content. And by “supporting” I don’t just mean offering free technical advice, sending out dev kits, and offering to hype your finished product on the app store. No, I mean actually paying senior developers decent salaries for years.
This isn’t to make a claim that such support programs didn’t exist elsewhere. I would have no way of knowing. What I do know is that I haven’t seen any fundamentally new, game-changing applications emerge. When headset manufacturers are hawking their wares, they often fall back on “you’ll be able to watch movies on a virtual screen” and “you’ll be able to participate in virtual 3D meetings” which is what Magic Leap was demoing ten years ago.
For developers, the economics are stark. These headsets typically have only a few thousand in circulation. That’s the whole market. Compare that with hundreds of millions for other platforms. No developer is going to enter the infinitesimal headset market without strong financial incentives.
There is another aspect to this that makes entering the headset content market even more forbidding to developers. When these systems get shut down, the software effectively winks out of existence. Typically, headset software can’t run - it can’t even boot up - without a connection to servers that make the whole integrated system work. When a company shuts down those servers, all of the software that depended on them effectively ceases to exist. Devs who spent years of their careers crafting works of interactive art have seen it all wiped out. With that kind of track record I consider it very unlikely that developers will sign on to build content for the next generation of headsets that comes along, supposing that ever happens.
The complicating factor in all this is that people who develop games actually are artists. They come to it from a range of more or less technical disciplines, but behaviorally they are artists. This means that they make career decisions, and respond to incentives, that aren’t obvious, and don’t make sense, to most tech industry types. This greatly complicates the process of hiring and/or financing them. I banged on at some length about this in an earlier post which - fair warning - has some overlap with this one.
Hundreds of millions of people use the (no-goggle) Metaverse
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.
Losing - and finding - the plot
When you are reading about the Metaverse, or something similar to it, in a novel, or watching it in a movie, you are reading a novel or watching a movie. And those things have plots. There’s a beginning, middle, and (never mind what A16Z has to say about me) an end. It’s quite easy to get carried away thinking about how cool it would be to actually build a system that could, on an engineering level, do the things that the fictional technology is depicted as doing in the book or the movie. Having built it, though, you might discover that it’s just a lot of randos milling around waiting for something to happen.
Fortnite, just to name one example of an extremely successful Metaverse-like world, remedies this by imposing a gamified structure on the user experience. It is straightforward and repetitive, but it works. When you enter a play session you know in general - but not in detail - what’s going to happen, and you know that it’ll be over in about twenty minutes. In my opinion (which some may feel free to disregard after the matter of the eighty billion dollars) this is only the beginning of what will become possible in coming years. Even one one-millionth of what Meta spent is enough to fund significant progress in this area if you have a small, talented, and dedicated team.
During the fallow period while I wait for D to come out, I’m working with such a team, actually writing some code in Verse, a new programming language that is being developed within Epic Games to support such systems. What you’re likely to see in coming years is developers continuing to build on what has been made economically possible by those hundreds of millions of users. Not just to implement a thirty-five-year-old fictional construct, but to keep improving what the idea has, in the meantime, evolved into.
I enjoyed this piece.
One perspective that might complicate the “$80B failure” narrative is that much of the investment may have been laying the groundwork for something slightly different.
A lot of the VR R&D Meta funded, including computer vision, environmental mapping, sensors, and optics, also happens to be the core infrastructure needed for practical augmented reality. In that sense, the headset push may have functioned as a stepping stone toward mixed reality systems rather than a pure attempt to build the fully virtual Metaverse described in Snow Crash.
The shift toward devices like the Ray Ban glasses suggests that Meta may have concluded something similar to your point: people are far more comfortable augmenting the real world than replacing it. A digital object appearing on your actual kitchen table is often more compelling than sitting inside a completely virtual room.
The other wrinkle is that generative AI arrived at exactly the wrong moment for the Metaverse narrative. AI dramatically expanded cognitive capability across writing, speaking, and creating media, while the Metaverse was trying to expand sensory immersion. For now, the cognitive upgrade seems to have captured most of the public’s attention.
It will be interesting to see whether spatial computing becomes more attractive once the novelty of flat AI generated media wears off.
ELI5: Goggles? outside the mind.
AKA zero opportunity for genuine empathy. No need to ingest a world, put oneself into another's place and imagine 'what if'?
Artists only work inside the mind and if your tools don't allow for that, those tools will fail.