Science fiction author Neal Stephenson, who coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has argued he and others who believed immersive environments would require head-mounted hardware got it wrong.
In a post penned to mark Meta’s recent decision to end its work on the Metaverse after blowing through $80 billion, Stephenson said that twenty years ago, when he worked at virtual reality hardware company Magic Leap, he would ask “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,” he wrote. Now he thinks that another 20 years into the future, devices like smartphones will still dominate. “Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces.”
I never understood the hype of VR goggles beyond things like VR Chat combined with body trackers. Fun to watch people make an ass of themselves in VR games, but that only lasts so long before it gets boring.
That’s my take, at least.
PC VR is amazing, but still the number of worthwhile full feature games is still small. Meta is just claiming VR is dead because their product sucks: their game library is shit, the metaverse was a joke, and their headsets are privacy nightmares. “Nobody wants what we’re selling, so obviously it’s the tech’s fault.”
I love VR and still gave away my quest 4 and deleted my account. I’m happily waiting for the Steam Frame to come out.
I really enjoyed Beat Saber for a while. It seemed like the only game that really made VR worth it as a hard requirement, though. Pavlov was fun for a while, too, but my knees definitely suffered.