Dec 7, 2022
Meta-Averse: Why Microsoft and Facebook are Selling Something That Does Not Exist Yet
Progress via new problems, not new solutions.
When something new comes, we try to repurpose what we already have and see how it fits into it. Like I am gaming on my phone, can I game in VR now? I bought a T-shirt from my local shop can I buy it online now? But new technologies truly flourish only when they enable truly new experiences. Otherwise, why would it even exist!
Currently Facebook and Microsoft are touting metaverse for social experiences because they are trying to recreate the feeling of hanging out in VR. But the vision is just a literal extension of reality today. Hanging out in a VR Fortnite game is claimed to be the new way of hanging out at a local games parlour with friends. To remain familiar, the ideas are weak.
Similarly, when online e-commerce first started, we were able to browse millions of books from the comfort of our home. It was an infinite mall. Soon, almost everything we wanted to buy we could order online and then need to drive to the local Walmart dried up, because we could just search and order all these things. But one category is still difficult online — furniture.
Now yes we can still order large furniture online and companies are touting that we can preview the same in VR. But how about actually visualising the furniture in your own home with your phone with AR. Now this is something that was just not possible in the offline world. No need to remember the length and width measurements of the sofa you want to fit in your living room. Just scan your room and it auto applies the filters and you can quickly swipe through the available sofa options.
(Note: AR differs from VR because the furniture is in the context of your own house and not in some virtual environment).
This is what I mean by new solutions to totally new problems. These are not marginal jumps. These are truly new solutions that need to be leap frogged directly into. The marginal approach is to take one of the images in the product listing and make it a video or make it an AR experience. But the shop itself needs to start from the AR experience. No more listings, no more filters. The AR experience is itself the user-interface.
This is where the smart watch struggled for some time. People tried to make the phone smaller and ask why don’t apps run on this device. Even Apple was guilty of this by launching the App Store support on day one on the Apple Watch. There is till no app that new watch owners must install on day one, no killer watch app.
The best watch app is the Fitness app. Because that is one place where one won’t carry their phone with them, but they need the music and they need the activity tracking.
And that is how technology achieves true adoption, by bringing totally new solutions to totally new problems. AR will stop becoming a buzz word only once our demos go beyond basic extensions of what we already do and into truly new usecases.
—
Inspired by https://bzamayo.com/metaverse-is-not-real
