Not just Zuckerberg’s world: The true value of the metaverse
Angus Stevens, chair and co-founder the Australian Metaverse Advisory Council, explores how how Meta’s metaverse vision has struggled with consumer adoption but thrives in enterprise applications, driving innovation in fields like training, urban planning, and digital modelling.
It was hard to escape the photo of Mark Zuckerberg from the September announcement of Orion, Meta’s augmented reality (AR) glasses. The distinctive thick black frames dominated the CEO’s face, representing millions of dollars in R&D and the next step in metaverse hardware. You can’t buy the glasses yet – they’re still too expensive for consumer-level use – but the prototype has already raised expectations regarding the future of augmented and virtual reality (VR).
The problem with Zuckerberg is that hype tends to follow his lead, sometimes to the detriment of other interesting things. A handful of years ago, during the height of the pandemic, Meta invested heavily in the metaverse, which largely featured avatars meeting in virtual spaces. It was an apt solution when isolation forced people apart physically; today, it’s populated by diehards hanging out in niche secondary worlds. Meta’s hope was that its virtual space would become an avatar-led social meeting platform that would complement its other products, namely Facebook and WhatsApp, but the space wasn’t compelling enough to encourage continual use.
What went wrong? One of the biggest misses for the metaverse was the ‘build it and they will come’ mentality. While a re-creation of ancient Greece might be a fun tourist experience, it’s unlikely to attract users again and again. Building it with a target user in mind – history teachers or budding archaeologists, perhaps – would make it a more useful virtual world. Tech companies that have built metaverse applications for specific uses, however, have seen rising opportunities across many industries.
