Will Meta's virtual reality bet succeed?

> Are there use cases that will lead to mainstream adoption

I want private metaverses which are community funded and don't rely on the surveillance apparatus of Meta. The Internet already has metaverses, the only difference is they're not experienced with VR headsets. There are many self-funded communities that rely on donations to sustain themselves and earn the creators and admins a living so they can dedicate all their time to their community.

The problem with Meta is that you're in their own surveillance ecosystem and can't opt out unless you have serious mullah to branch off to your own private metaverse. But I believe this can be achieved with open source codebases powered by donations that can power these private metaverses and onboarding donators who are not relying on Meta's billions.

There's no way to know, but until something changes, I assume it will have limited success but not set the world on fire. Even if the technology gets really good and really cheap, there's still the issue of whether people want to use it for non-video game purposes, which from my very informal survey of coworkers is "no".

My theory is that the failure of VR for business is going to be that it is bringing synchronous work back to a workforce that has mostly realized that it wants to work asynchronously. That is, it's trying to recreate being in an office, which is precisely what a lot of people don't want right now.

There may be some cases it's useful for, but it's not going to result in hundreds of billions of dollars of profit without being widely adopted for general purpose "metaverse" usage.

VR will almost certainly catch on with gaming. If you've been on a VR roller coaster or walked a VR plank, it's clear that your mind can be tricked visually with goggles in a way that a screen will never be able to do.

Meta's reputation is negative and I think most people want to see it fail. Zuckerberg (and Thiel) is just too evil. So I think Meta will have an uphill battle.

A lot of the products that Apple puts out were developed by Microsoft research or even Xerox, but they were ahead of their time. Meta is likely experiencing the pain of being the first to devote resources to an unproven market that will likely be popularized by someone who figures out how to do it better, cheaper, or for a particular niche first.

One compounding VR problem is that of peripherals. One can imagine driving a car, walking "in place", or even piloting a jet fighter... the peripherals and peripheral feedback are probably as important as the goggles themselves to those experiences.

If computer history is any indication, then the first VR company to develop a killer app will win the market. I personally expect apple to release VR next year, and they will probably eat Meta's lunch because apple specializes in luxury products and VR is very much a luxury product right now. One important caveat is that I don't think Apple will launch unless they have a killer app.

I always thought VR is a perfect match for sports, like hardcore sports fans. You can literally be on the field if you want. Of course, NFL/NBA/NHL would not cooperate because it eats into their stadium sales.

> Are there use cases that will lead to mainstream adoption or adoption in some niche at least?

Immediate use cases I can think of is gaming, enterprise applications in industries like automotive, aerospace and medicine.

If the price of the headset drops then maybe in the field of remote-collaboration, arts and education.

It won't be a 24/7 usage device. But I still fear that users could get sucked into an environment where they will lose all sense of time and space for a long time and will have lot of physical and mental health issues.

It's not hard to imagine a dystopian future in which all knowledge work is done remotely in VR in which every action is tracked and recorded. Not that I would like it but it's not that big of a stretch from a technological capability POV.

It's difficult to predict the future though.

No, of course not. Nothing new has been added and no new use cases have arrived. Sure, there's some marginal advancement in display and computation, but nothing revolutionary or cheap enough to get wide spread adoption.

It is, by most accounts a worse vrchat, and on a dying, largely despised url. VR (moreso AR) has a future, meta (in any form similar to how it currently exists) most likely does not.

Mainstream adoption won't happen but industrial adoption might because it is the perfect use case for remote robotics, e.g. construction, mining, oil tanker navigation, etc.