The Virtual Reality Metaverse is Nonsense

This was written in August 2015. With Ready Player One hitting movie theaters this week, I dusted off this draft and decided to finally publish.

Have you heard of the Metaverse? It’s a dreamy idea originating from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. People put on their VR headsets, boot up a Metaverse app, and explore various 3D virtual spaces within a digital universe. You might jump from a gaming arena to a night club. Relax at a virtual waterfall, or chill in your own personal space that you created to suit your taste. You could invite friends to your space, or visit them in their own creations. You might go shopping in a virtual mall, and buy new digital goods to accessorize your virtual avatar.

For decades, people have been (over) hyping the Metaverse and they are wrong

Here’s the problem: the Metaverse sounds good on paper, but would be horrible to actually use.

In the early days of personal computing and the Internet, people envisioned digital shopping malls and libraries. Instead of physically going to a store or a library, one could use a computer to look up information or purchase items. What would these digital libraries look like? In the 1994 movie Disclosure, actor Michael Douglas uses VR to walk around a virtual library, opening virtual file cabinets to search for some data.

In hindsight, this is hilarious. A simple interface like Google is a far superior method for querying information than walking through a digital, 3D library. A digital, 3D shopping mall is a laughable idea compared to the utility of Amazon.

We already have a Metaverse — it’s called the Internet

The Internet provide us with the dreamy concepts of a Metaverse, but grounded with the realities of product design. Using a web browser or a smartphone, you can jump from a shopping mall (Amazon) to a library (Google) to your personal space (Facebook). There are virtual meeting spaces (Skype), and even gaming arenas (Valve’s Steam). However, none of them skeuomorphically mimic the real world. Instead, they are designed to fit the constraints and strengths of 2D screens on our computing devices.

If we could teleport in the real world, we would

Unfortunately, we’re forced to slowly walk from place to place, or use other modes of faster transportation. It would be ridiculous to bring such an inefficient constraint of the real world into the digital. Instead, we use hyperlinks to jump around on the web, and app icons on desktops and smartphones. This is teleportation in the digital sense.

One company doesn’t own everything

Instead of one monolithic Internet company, tiny pieces of the Metaverse dream became billion-dollar companies such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook. If a startup tried to do everything, the result would be a company/product that was good at nothing. Focus is a key requirement for product design and startups. One company owning the entire metaverse would be horribly dystopian.

So why are people desperately trying to create a Metaverse?

If the Metaverse is a bad idea from a product design & user experience perspective, why do people keep trying to make this? Simple: it’s alluring!

People are attracted to big, sexy ideas, and there is no idea bigger than creating a Metaverse that contains everything humans desire

Perhaps it’s a god complex. These people are not grounded in the realities of product design. They ignore what makes a good product experience, and chase the alluring idea instead.

Here’s what to expect with Virtual Reality — Metaverse 2.0

If we consider the Internet, the web, and the smartphone eras as a “Metaverse 1.0” what can we expect from Virtual Reality?

The Metaverse 2.0 will be a collection of many companies with their own VR apps. If you want to fly through planets and stars, you would boot up a game like EVE: Valkyrie. You might create and relax in your own personal space created inside a Sims VR game. One could explore Ancient Rome or the depths of the Mariana Trench, inside apps dedicated to those experiences.

Instead of walking through a virtual 3D strip mall, imagine a Nike VR app where you can browse, design, and purchase shoes. You can inspect a shoe in 3D, looking closely from any angle before purchasing. This may be far more compelling compared to 2D pictures on Nike’s website that don’t properly convey what the shoe actually looks like from all angles.

The user interfaces for interacting with virtual content will be nothing like the real world. You won’t be walking around a virtual store, pulling virtual items off the virtual shelves. When shopping for novels or comic books, you won’t have to walk down long hallways in a virtual book store. You won’t have to grab each virtual page by the corner to flip to the next page.

Instead, you will use gestures and controllers to swipe, grab, and interact with objects in 3D space. In the future, there may be an easier way of jumping from VR app to VR app that is better suited for VR’s 3D space than clicking 2D icons in Windows.

At Bigscreen, we’re not trying to build the Metaverse. We’re building useful applications in that enable people to work, play, and hangout in VR/AR. We’re focused on use cases such a social VR movie theater. We’re also exploring collaboration tools, meeting spaces, VR gaming lounges, and interesting challenges in spatial computing.

Sound interesting to you? Come join our fully remote team. We’re hiring engineers, artists, and designers.