The Guardian
Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision is over. Can Apple save it?
Story by Alex Hern • 22-5-2023
It is not just outsiders Meta needs to convince. Even its own shareholders are starting to revolt. The company lost $13.7bn on its “reality labs” unit, which handles research into virtual reality and augmented reality tech, in the last year alone. In a December 2022 blogpost from the unit’s head, Andrew Bosworth, he predicted that a full fifth of the company’s expenditure this year would land with the unit.
But despite the years of investment, there is still only one real area where the underlying technology is actually paying off: video games.
Meta’s Quest 2 headset, a £400 standalone device, is the market leader, capable of handling some of the most popular VR games on the market, including the Meta-owned rhythm game Beat Saber, and VR exercise title Supernatural. Connect it to a powerful gaming PC and it can play even more, including the critically acclaimed Half-Life Alyx, a sequel to 2004’s Half-Life 2. (For non-gamers, imagine if Doctor Who had returned from its 1996 to 2005 hiatus in the form of a Sarah Jane Smith-focused spin-off series that was exclusive to 3D TVs. And then won a best drama Bafta.)
“Meta has done a huge amount of backpedalling about what it thinks is and is not the metaverse,” said Whatley. “I’ve seen Meta presentations that say augmented reality filters on Instagram count as the metaverse. But then I’ve also seen them say that we are all building the metaverse together. It’s quite telling that 100% of the top 38 bestselling experiences for the Quest 2 are all video games. The 39th is a ‘walk the plank’ experience.”
And in that world, Meta is hardly unchallenged. Half-Life Alyx was made for a rival PC platform, the £919 Valve Index, which serves the needs of diehard VR gamers with its “room scale” approach, while Sony’s £529 PlayStation VR2 offers a similar high-fidelity approach for console gamers with a PlayStation 5 in the living room.
And then there is the elephant in the room – and the reason why it may still be too early to fully write off Meta’s metaverse ambitions altogether. On 5 June, Apple is set to lift the lid on the worst kept secret in tech: its own virtual reality headset.
Piecing together leaks from the supply chain, reports from California and the groundwork the company has laid with developers, it is clear that the iPhone maker is planning to take a radically different approach from its rival, with a price tag in the thousands of dollars and a long-term goal to create a device that people do not feel the need to take off when they want to speak to people in the same room as them.
Like so much in the metaverse space, it is a vision that makes sense when you are planning for a decade’s time: with a refined version of these headsets that bundles the same technology in a pair of glasses, it could even be an appealing prospect to speak to the avatar of a work colleague floating in virtual space if the alternative is staring at yet another Zoom window.
But getting from here to there is going to be a hard and thankless slog – and even Zuckerberg cannot burn $10bn a year for ever.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, says the metaverse is still in its infancy. Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images
© Provided by The Guardian
Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision is over. Can Apple save it?
Story by Alex Hern • 22-5-2023
It is not just outsiders Meta needs to convince. Even its own shareholders are starting to revolt. The company lost $13.7bn on its “reality labs” unit, which handles research into virtual reality and augmented reality tech, in the last year alone. In a December 2022 blogpost from the unit’s head, Andrew Bosworth, he predicted that a full fifth of the company’s expenditure this year would land with the unit.
But despite the years of investment, there is still only one real area where the underlying technology is actually paying off: video games.
Meta’s Quest 2 headset, a £400 standalone device, is the market leader, capable of handling some of the most popular VR games on the market, including the Meta-owned rhythm game Beat Saber, and VR exercise title Supernatural. Connect it to a powerful gaming PC and it can play even more, including the critically acclaimed Half-Life Alyx, a sequel to 2004’s Half-Life 2. (For non-gamers, imagine if Doctor Who had returned from its 1996 to 2005 hiatus in the form of a Sarah Jane Smith-focused spin-off series that was exclusive to 3D TVs. And then won a best drama Bafta.)
“Meta has done a huge amount of backpedalling about what it thinks is and is not the metaverse,” said Whatley. “I’ve seen Meta presentations that say augmented reality filters on Instagram count as the metaverse. But then I’ve also seen them say that we are all building the metaverse together. It’s quite telling that 100% of the top 38 bestselling experiences for the Quest 2 are all video games. The 39th is a ‘walk the plank’ experience.”
And in that world, Meta is hardly unchallenged. Half-Life Alyx was made for a rival PC platform, the £919 Valve Index, which serves the needs of diehard VR gamers with its “room scale” approach, while Sony’s £529 PlayStation VR2 offers a similar high-fidelity approach for console gamers with a PlayStation 5 in the living room.
And then there is the elephant in the room – and the reason why it may still be too early to fully write off Meta’s metaverse ambitions altogether. On 5 June, Apple is set to lift the lid on the worst kept secret in tech: its own virtual reality headset.
Piecing together leaks from the supply chain, reports from California and the groundwork the company has laid with developers, it is clear that the iPhone maker is planning to take a radically different approach from its rival, with a price tag in the thousands of dollars and a long-term goal to create a device that people do not feel the need to take off when they want to speak to people in the same room as them.
Like so much in the metaverse space, it is a vision that makes sense when you are planning for a decade’s time: with a refined version of these headsets that bundles the same technology in a pair of glasses, it could even be an appealing prospect to speak to the avatar of a work colleague floating in virtual space if the alternative is staring at yet another Zoom window.
But getting from here to there is going to be a hard and thankless slog – and even Zuckerberg cannot burn $10bn a year for ever.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, says the metaverse is still in its infancy. Photograph: Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP/Getty Images
© Provided by The Guardian
12 months ago
