On March 17th, Meta announced that they were going to ‘pull the plug’ on their Metaverse Horizon Worlds, at least for VR (In reality they’re going to separate it from the Quest store and keep it as a Roblox competitor, so you can still access it from the mobile). This was a blow for a number of world builders who again lost an immersive platform. During my years spent building VR experiences, I found myself witnessing the death of VR ecosystems. From Tivoli Cloud VR, Altspace VR, Neos VR, to Mozilla Hubs, it seems that there still isn’t a stable place on the Internet for Social VR.
While there’s still a number of other platforms like FrameVR, Resonite, Sansar, VRChat, Rec Room and Spatial, its hard to ignore the ticking time bomb waiting to go off when funding ends or obsolescence catches them.
However, the Metaverse is far from dead; the audience and builders just need to see it as a very slow-cooking stew. Currently, there are a number of games and experiences that gather thousands of players every day. Imagine that Roblox has a DAU (Daily Active Users) of approximately 150 million. That is a population larger than Mexico or Vietnam. This means that the technology to handle a digital nation is already here to support the Metaverse. Another notable example is PUBG Mobile with a DAU of 30 million.
These games aren’t VR, but they are Social Metaverses. You can socialize around an activity and meet new people, play with your friends or just hang around freely. This is the sole objective of a Metaverse: To have a digital space to experience something virtually. However with VR we have many issues to solve before ‘getting to the Metaverse’.
These issues range from hardware to infrastructure and expertise. I will go in more detail in another post, but building the Metaverse is a task that is technically demanding at this time. The pandemic gave it a boost that sparked a lot of hype, but it quickly faded away because the Metaverse has a fundamental issue of purpose and utility. Whether it is education, training, digital twins or entertainment, it still hasn’t found its ‘killer app’.
An article on The New York Times titled The Long Farewell to Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, mentions that Meta spent $80 billion building it, just to abandon it in favor of AI. I know that this number has to be seen with a bit of caution. It’s not that the Metaverse costs those $80 billion, but that the R&D that goes to building headsets and their immersive projects also encompasses that amount of money. The Quest 3 is still being manufactured, and there are several experimental headsets and devices now waiting to become a product. And also Meta is known for killing their own ideas around the immersive arena. Like the time they shut down SparkAR, a platform that allowed users to create augmented reality content for Instagram and Facebook, or the discontinuation of their Meta Quest Pro, a headset with eye tracking.
This is a long and winding road for XR developers, and seems it isn’t going to be easy at least for another 10 years.
The good news is that the real Metaverse platform is already here: WebXR. This technology allows you to serve your world just like a website. The bad news is that it still needs better infrastructure, standardized avatar protocols and interactions.
There are great tools to build WebXR metaverses like Hubs-CE, formerly known as Mozilla-Hubs. However, it still has a steep learning curve to set it up, and relatively high server costs if you don’t know how to manage it. Despite these hurdles, it solves the biggest issue that most social VR platforms have: they’re walled gardens, but a native web solution is the equivalent of a website. You don’t have to download a massive app and sign up for a proprietary service just to visit one place.
So while we endure the road to the Metaverse, keep in mind that the journey is worth it. Immersion and telepresence will become a necessity for the tasks that facilitate our lives. They will help us connect with others in any corner of the planet. We must choose to build on the open web instead of a walled garden. That is the only way we can truly own the pot for this stew.