Towards the Future of Virtual Reality: How Meta Worlds Meets Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Web Browsers to Make VR Users Efficient
By now you’ve heard enough about the metaverse to think it’s on the way. But don’t expect many true metaverse experiences to gain mass adoption in 2023. Instead, 2023 will be the year when we’ll become “metaverse-ready.”
Meta has placed a bet and it may have put it in front of competitors. The company’s consumer V.R. headset, the Quest 2, is the most popular V.R. headset on the market with more than 15 million sold, according to outside estimates. The app has been installed on more than 21 million phones according to an estimate by Sensor Tower.
The number of monthly active users for Meta’s game, known as Horizon Worlds, has grown from a small increase in a few months to 300,000, but is minuscule compared with Facebook’s over 2 billion monthly active users. The company declined to provide more up-to-date figures for Horizon Worlds.
Perhaps to compensate for that, Meta also announced a significant shift in who gets to access its metaverse. He claims that the destiny is to be the means by which we socialize. But he knows as well as anyone that network effects are critical in social apps. Buying a virtual reality rig is something that should be used with your friends, if they don’t have their own rigs. It helps if the new headsets can track your facial expressions, have a brighter screen, and not feel like you are wearing an anvil on your face. The platform will not reach critical mass if the cost of comfort is prohibitive. So in an effort to broaden the use of the technology in social settings, Meta announced two new features that will arrive in 2023. People will be able to access the company’s version of the metaverse, Horizon Worlds, via web browser. The groups of VR explorers will be able to come in via the video link.
This could be awkward. The keynote of the annual event for virtual reality developers gave people a glimpse of what the future of meetings might look like. It’s a shared space called a “Magic Room,” which Meta says is intended to “make collaborators feel equally present in a shared space, no matter where they are or what tech they’re using.” The company says you can even achieve this presence in virtual reality via your phone.
The playing field appears far from the vision in the clip he showed. A team of people working at a virtual table constructed a prototype of a skateboard. Did you know that three of them were at the table? Two people wearing headsets were in the actual room to view the imaginary objects. One of them was working remotely and had the ability to manipulate the artificial objects. But the fourth participant was a second-class citizen of the metaverse, visible only as a face on a virtual monitor, numbly grinning while he watched others creating what looked like a fairly lame toy skateboard out of thin air. Three people are hacking away at a project and are suddenly happy with their accomplishment, fist-bumping, dancing and generally having a hoot. You almost expect them to break out in an ensemble performance of “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid. The pathetic zoom guy looks on.
As much as we gripe about Zoom, one good thing about it is that it equalizes the power dynamic of meetings. Imagine being trapped in those little boxes while everybody else is virtually cavorting.
Did Meta expect this to impress? Well—it didn’t. The message about appendages was met with mockery. They couldn’t save the reputation of the company. Meta had spent $36 billion to create a permanently accessible virtual-reality world that will run alongside this one. Yet Horizon Worlds was a glitchy ghost town. Even though they aren’t allowed, the people who used it were creeps or children. Not even Meta’s own employees took to it. The best it could do was create a Second Life clone, and it seemed like it would be a flop.
In the past few years, metaverse startups like Decentraland and the Sandbox grabbed venture capital interest by hyping themselves as hubs for a new NFT-fueled economy. Despite these companies’ hefty valuations, they have remained decidedly niche. Decentraland said it had an average of 8000 daily active users, which was still tiny, despite a third-party report that it had 38 active users one day. Why did they gamble on something so wobbly?
The metaverse will have technological standards that will be crucial to succeed. The internet was aided by ensuring that web pages looked the same in all browsers. Similarly, companies and individuals won’t spend time and money creating content for the metaverse if they can’t publish that content anywhere and have it look—and behave—as they intend it to. There’s still lots of work to do here, but groups like Khronos Group, the Realtime Conference, and Metaverse Standards Forum are bringing together tech companies, hardware makers, and retailers to work on open standards that will begin to govern metaverse content. Among the standards under development is USD, known as the HTML of the metaverse, which will allow 3D assets to be shared and rendered across many different immersive experiences. Another standard, glTF, the JPEG of 3D, will allow 3D assets to be compressed so that they’re small enough to be transmitted efficiently.
3D creation is being used to design new products. Tommy Hilfiger used 3D assets to shave two weeks off its design review process. Designers at footwear brand Salomon also found that rendering new shoe designs virtually cuts the time to produce a prototype by up to 67 percent.
The metaverse does not exist: A challenge to spend time during the holidays in Meta’s Horizon Worlds – Bringing people together in the Metaverse
I’m a “metaverse skeptic” to say the least. The term entered common parlance without really referring to any particular technology, and the companies who promote it most don’t seem to be very good at building However, I’m open minded. So when my editor came to me with a challenge to spend time during the holidays in “the metaverse,” I was down to give it a shot.
The idea was easy to understand. Meta claims that their metaverse platforms will bring people together. Well, the holidays would be a perfect time to test this. It’s a time for family gatherings, often involving loved ones from other states. If ever there was an opportunity for new tech to connect physically distant people … well, it would be March 2020. The holidays are a close second.
We decided to use the platform Meta’s Horizon Worlds. And it’s worth noting that this choice is a result of starting this experiment from the end. If the goal was simply putting different people together in the same virtual room, that exists! We’ve spent time in Animal Crossing and Zoom calls.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/holiday-party-horizon-worlds-the-metaverse-doesnt-exist/
What can I learn about VR in general relativity? A close friend’s ex-wife says she doesn’t have a virtual reality headset
I asked people they could help me with the experiment. I asked my friends, partners and family. People who lived thousands of miles away and people who lived down the street were asked. I talked to many people and they all agreed to do the experiment with me. It’s that no one could.
Though willingness was in short supply, as well. One friend in particular—someone I love dearly and won’t get to see for the holidays, in other words a perfect candidate for this experiment—said she’d be willing to help. Grudgingly. The idea didn’t appeal on its own. It would be a stark reminder that you’re not here. Still, she agreed to try it out in principle—but she couldn’t because, like everyone else I knew, she didn’t own a headset.
Maybe I was just unlucky, but I’m probably not alone. Hard data is a little hard to pin down—in part because many polls lump together owning a VR headset with merely using one—but one survey from eMarketer released in 2021 estimated that by this year, only 31.3 million people in the US would “experience VR content” once a month in VR. That’s not a virtual reality headset.
Exploring Mixed Reality with a Redneck: Eric Schudiske, CEO of Meta, and a Client of his Clients in Workrooms
In one of his first few VR meetings inside Meta’s Horizon Workrooms in December 2021, Eric Schudiske, the 48-year-old CEO of the tech-focused agency s2s Public Relations, showed his age. The Gen Xer in a necktie spoke to his five-person team from a virtual conference room with a deer head on the wall and a foggy evergreen forest.
He changed his persona as I observe in a recent internal Workrooms team meeting when he invited me to join. Swiveling his chair towards a Zoom-like projection of my face on a curved screen hovering in the room, Schudiske touts a client’s upcoming grant meeting with Bill Gates—a “monocle and smoking jacket” affair, he calls it sardonically. Around a half-moon-shaped table, several blank-faced avatars shake their shoulders in apparent laughter.
One of the staffers said they were just hanging out with Bill Gates. This interruption is different from a typical video call. With Workroom’s distance and directionally modeled spatial audio, you can interject without the risk of inadvertently hijacking someone’s soliloquy.
It’s one of the immersive mixed-reality features that Mike LeBeau, product management director for Workrooms, claims has taken Meta’s VR business offering to a key inflection point. It is now being beta tested by users at organizations such as NASA, PwC, automation software company The Bot Platform, and surgical training platform Osso VR.
At many firms, Workrooms is being used to translate the kind of real-world “social presence” remote workers have missed in Hollywood Squares-style videoconferences to virtual conference rooms. Strapped into Quest 2 headsets that retail for about $400, or the more optically rich and expensive Quest Pro headsets (which cost $1,500), teams can conduct meetings, give presentations, host design reviews, and hold drop-in coworking hours—all while seemingly inhabiting the same room.
“You can convince people to go into VR to play Star Wars and Batman,” said Brian Penny, a media strategist at ZEITG3IST, a digital marketing agency based in New York. “But you sincerely think people will spend $400 on a headset so they can spend their lives in an even duller, drabber, and more boring office than they already go to?”