In late October 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta. And announced the ambitious Metaverse project in the Connect 2021 keynote. I was excited to see a tech giant pledged to invest heavily into an unknown realm and bet its future on it. As a used-to-be industrial design practitioner who has fluent 3D skills, I even called my classmate at UW who had a passion for AR/VR saying that maybe we can do something together—like become developers for the Metaverse.
However, after spending some time thinking about it. I became cautious and eventually pessimistic about the Metaverse. The rationales were based on my experience working on software + hardware projects as a Product Manager & Designer for 7+ years.
I wanted to write this post as early as November 2021. But as I was busy working on the End-of-Year campaigns and product planning works for my full-time job, plus my Christmas road trip to Oregon, I procrastinated until now.
TL; DR & My Opinions
- Zuckerberg hopes the Metaverse to be the successor to the mobile internet.
- My opinion: While theoretically useful and cool, some scientific & cognition challenges can block the wide adoption of the tech. The reception of the solution by the mainstream population will decide if Metaverse can live up to the hype.
- My opinion: I believe the adoption would be better in the professional market vs. the consumer one.
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My opinion: Allowing people without VR headsets to engage in the Metaverse will lower the entrance barrier. With a boosting Metaverse population, the industry is more likely to invest more resources and build the ecosystem together.
If you have not watched the Connect 2021, no worries. Here are the “whys”, “hows”, and “whats” of the Metaverse according to Zuckerberg:
- From computers to cellphones with a camera, the Internet has a trend of being visual.
- From image to video, the medium is getting more immersive.
- Meta wants to build a successor of the mobile Internet.
- Regarding digital wellbeing, for Metaverse, it’s not making people spend more time on the screen, it’s to make the time spent more vivid.
- Zuckerberg hopes one billion people can enter the Metaverse in the next decade.
- Core concepts of the Metaverse are feeling of presence, avatar, home space, teleporting, interoperability, privacy & safety, virtual goods, natural interface.