From the moment I unboxed my Oculus DK2 in 2014, and for many many years after, I dedicated an immense amount of time and energy into building what — at the time — I considered the glorious future of our species: the Metaverse. Around 2108, I got very disillusioned with the concept, and adopted an almost Neo-Luddite PoV. I took a loooong sabbatical, as it were. Now, its 2024. GenAI is here, ChatGPT might be sentient, and….

basically, I felt it was time to re-assess. So I bought a Quest 3, charged it up, bought some apps, and put that thang on my head. What follows are my first reactions. From a veteran VR developer, who’s been out of the space for 6+ years, giving it a fresh look.

Here goes:

My Personal Journey into (and out of) the Metaverse

It all started at SIGGRAPH 1994 with an amazing demo by Disney Imagineering named “Alladin’s Magic Carpet VR.” It was a massive, carbon fiber laden prototype HMD, attached to two refridgerator-sized Silicon Graphics Onyx supercomputers, which rendered the stereo graphics in real time. It got my attention. But it was also a million-dollar baby.

It would take another 2 decades for Palmer Luckey to ship the Oculus DK2, arguably the first truly viable consumer VR HMD.

And at that point, I decided: the time was now.

For the next 4 years, I put my blood sweat and tears into building the best possible VR worlds. And we built a lot of them:

Solar System simulators. Detailed accurate models of the entire city of San Francisco. An Iron Man suit you could fly in. The entire set from Star Wars where Luke gets the lightsaber from Obi Wan… with interactive characters and props (we got a cease and desist from Disney for that one, right quick). Tony Stark’s garage, with all the cool cars in glorious hi-detail 3D. etc.

But after 4 years, I was burnt out, and somewhat disillusioned. The apps were making me nauseous. The hand controllers took years to deliver. The cords were constantly getting tangled. The GPUs were overheating. And most importantly: the consumers just weren’t buying the headsets.

So, I took a break.

Fast forward 6 years, and it might be time to re-examine the field.

So, with a fresh pair of eyes, lets ask:

Is VR better or worse than it was in 2018?

So, what has happened with VR in the 6 years since 2018? Having been on tech sabbatical gives me a unique perspective on what has been gained, and what has been lost. Spoiler alert: Its more loss than gain.

1. The hardware has become untethered.
   1. This was absolutely mandatory. Meta made — honestly — heroic efforts to fit the entire hardware stack into a wearable form factor that weights — in total, including computer, optics, and battery — less than 550g. That’s amazing. Unfortunately, its still far from light enough (link: the 50g form factor, and the AirPods Pro XR)
2. Passthrough is passable.
   1. again, this was a mandatory feature. I, and thousands of other VR “pioneers”, were constantly either having to “peek out” from under the visor, or more commonly, prop the visor up on our foreheads for minutes at a time, to deal with something in the real world (typically, a configuration that required performing an action with the physical keyboard, mouse, and / or 2d monitor)
   2. …but its not good enough. Many Many apps place you into “full immersion” mode, blacking out the passthrough… and this is extremely disorienting.
3. You still, truthfully, need a large padded room.
   1. Even with passthrough, too many apps shut it off. And then there you are, spinning and jumping and lunging and punching and becoming totally detached from your actual physical environment… and even tho you pushed the couch back, moved the clothes and shoes off the floor, at some point… BLAM! (ouch!), there you go. you just slammed your shin into the desk, or more commonly, smacked the shit out of the lamp, knocking it clear off the side table. Oops!
   2. We have to come to grips with the fact that the optimal playspace for “action” VR experiences, is in fact a room, about 14 x 14 feet, with high ceilings, zero furniture, and padded walls. If this sounds like a locked cell in a psychiatric institution… well… I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to why that is.
4. The graphics are less capable.
   1. Well, of course they are. I mean, Meta had to take what was essentially a high-end gaming PC with dedicated GPU — many of which devoured wattage in the hundreds range (my 2018 GPY alone drew 450 watts… my power supply was 1200 watts) and cram it into a miniscule package, and allow it to be battery powered. The Meta Quest 3 has a nominal power draw of 20 watts. That’s about 1/20th (5%) of my desktop PC VR gaming rig. So yes, you might imagine… some compromises had to be made.
   2. But… its been 6 years! This is technology! What about Moore’s Law? Well, to quote Mark Zuckerberg when he first witnessed the Apple Vision Pro announcement: “It’s good to see that Apple is bound and constrained by the exact same laws of physics and science that we are…  they haven’t launched anything truly novel that we haven’t already experimented with in our labs… they just are experimenting with a different BoM, and made different tradeoff decisions, in terms of weight, battery, optics, and cost.”
   3. Translated: there is only so much tech and firepower that you can fit onto your face. Despite the miracle of both companies cramming so much into a wearable package, the general consumer consensus remains: its still way to heavy for extended use. (within Meta, the telltale red marks that the headset leaves on your nose and below your eyes with extended use are called “HMD-face”)
5. The software has gone downhill
   1. Where art thou, Tiltbrush? (discontinued by Google).
      1. for many years, I told anyone who was VR-curious: “TiltBrush is the killer app for VR. There is no narrative… its not a videogame… its a creative studio. You make things. Light paintings. On an infinite canvas. For anyone who has ever drawn, or even thought about trying their hand at art, TiltBrush is an epiphany. This single app alone, to me, justifies the $2500 investment in a VR system ($1800 PC, $700 HMD).
   2. Et tu, Minecraft.VR? (you can only get it via a hacked “sideload”).
      1. John Carmack himself spent considerable time porting this app to Oculus. Obviously, it should be a signature VR app. I mean, the entire experience is 3D worlds. what better fit? Also, its superb elegance — super low-poly count cubes with low-rez textures — made sure that it could work fluidly on even low-powered phone platforms.
      2. But now when I google “why can’t I get Minecraft on my Quest 3?” the internet answers: “You need a PC VR rig running Oculus Heritage platform; the extreme graphics requirements of Minecraft exceed the ability of the Quest 3 HMD.” What?!? Is Minecraft suddenly raytraced Pixar? WTF?
   3. And what about my X-Plane 11? (photorealistic flight simulator)
      1. Now this one actually makes sense to me. It has to run on a PC. Photorealistic Flight Sim — with all the hardware — yoke, throttle, pedals — ain’t no joke. Just like Tiltbrush, for certain users (like me), this single app justifies the entire system investment (which is now > $4k… those hardware controllers ain’t cheap)
   4. And Elite Dangerous? (photorealistic space combat simulator)
      1. see X-Plane 11, above.
   5. Oh, and, um… AltSpaceVR, anyone? (shut down by Microsoft)
      1. more corporate greed.
6. BTW… where is the software, exactly?
   1. Its all on the Meta Store, of course… or is it? I was told that there were some all-star, breakaway titles. Not to my surprise, Beat Saber was still highly praised. Add to that list Rec Room, Walkabout Mini Golf, VR Chat, and Alix:Half Life.
   2. Not a single one of these apps is visible on any of the panels in my store… every single one of them required me to search by name… even “Gorilla Tag”, which has come tro great fame as the first VR app to gross > $100 million since launch.

the Climb : a Virtual Climbing Gym… NOT.

One of the things that has attracted me about physical computing (my term) for years, both in the projector-camera interactive systems that I designed for PlayMotion, and the apps I designed at dSky for VR, was the 1:1 nature of the interaction. Most videogames have players looking at miniature versions of themselves — their avatars — on some sort of screen, TV, phone, or other display. This abstraction is immediately alienating, and places an insurmountable barrier between the player, the narrative, and the experience.

By making the virtual world 1:1 — actual real-life human scale — you give the player a sense of both reality and immediacy that allows them to make the leap. In the VR community, this “magical” leap is called: presence.

My fantasy, for a full decade, had been that if we could make the scale 1:1, and if we could use the human’s natural movements as inputs… then we could actually train real world skills, in VR. in other words, it was one thing to beat Mortal Kombat with 6 buttons and a joystick. It was quite another to enter into an MMA match where every punch required a real punch, and damage was calculated by actual speed, accuracy, and force of the physical gesture.

In my imagination, we were building the equivalent of the Dojo in the Matrix. where Neo went in for 12 hours straight, came out the other side, and announced with awe: “I know kung-fu!” I thought: if we forced people to actually control their avatars with real motion, then they could only succeed with expert motion, and thus: they would learn expert motion. A virtual black belt, as it were.

Oh, how the ignorant can dream!

The Fallacy of virtual martial arts is this:
In the real world, in order to actually earn your stripes,
you have to actually hit something.

It can be a bag, it can be a human, or it can be a pork belly… but you’d better impact something. that’s real combat training. that’s real life. impact, trauma… fricking …wrist alignment.

If your wrists are off angle while “air-boxing”, neither you nor the training system will know any better. But if your wrist is 10° off angle when you hit the heavy bag with maximum power, you will know it, immediately. You will probably actually sprain your wrist. If its a human you’re hitting, you might even break your hand.

Real life teaches real lessons. Virtual Boxing builds virtual competency. It does not translate to the real world. In fact, it may harm real world performance, via sloppy technique and false confidence that is tuned more to a high-score algorithm than to actual human combat.

…which brings us to the first VR I played in a long time: the Climb.

<I will spare you all the detail and just summarize my experience in the Climb: sweaty palms, a lot of terrifying falls without actually falling (!cognitive dissonance!), obscure routes, and a challenging crux “dyno” move that had me leaping wildly across my living room, crashing straight into my lamp>

So that was my re-entry…

…but I hate to tell you, what happened next? Even worse.

> Read about my 2024 adventure into Metaverse Dystopia… courtesy of RecRoom VR

Dark Side of the Moon Metaverse

The Metaverse ain’t open source: What are the motivations?

In the seminal novel SnowCrash by Neil Stephenson, the BlackSun, and indeed the entire MetaVerse, is a massive open source project. Sure, it has many corporate presences… the 360 3D equivalents of corporate websites… but, just like the internet, it was by and large a space by the people, for the people. Kind of like the internet was, before SEO AI, before genAI… you know, the Internets, c.2017.

But who is investing the most to build the Metaverse — arguably the 3D 360 replacement of the internet — today?

Hint: its not the DoD, or DARPA, or academia (the combination of three who can be largely credited for building the foundations of what is today the internet). No, it is primarily two massive and one boutique companies:

• Meta (Quest),
• Apple (Vision Pro), and
• Valve (Vive)

Dark horses include Roblox, Epic Games (Fortnite), Google, and nVidia (Omniverse) . Ultra-long shot and perhaps spookiest of the lot is DecentraLand, a pure Web3 play that has made billions by selling virtual real estate (following the model of Second Life from the early 2000s).

Microsoft (xBox)and Sony (PlayStation) are also fairly well positioned due to their gaming consoles, but even with the PSVR, not much true Metaverse progress has been made on those platforms.

Both Apple and Meta are on record as having invested >$30billion each in VR/AR/MR/XR* R&D. Those multinational corporations (currently the 1st and 7th most valuable companies on the planet) are not in the business of charity. In fact, the engine of capitalism makes their motivation and goals very simple, and singular: The sole objective of a for-profit corporation is:

Increase Shareholder Value.

That’s it. Not to save humanity. Not to deliver cool inventions. Not to make your life easier. Not to deliver upon a geek-tech-fantasy-world-wet-dream. No. None of that. Simple and solely: the purpose of a corporation is to increase shareholder value. Translated into EveryManSpeak, that rule is: “Make Money. and Make More Money. By Any Means Necessary.”

the “by any means necessary” is not empty words. We can (viably) argue that idealistic founders like Jobs & Wozniak, Brin & Page, Luckey & Carmack, actually have visions of making the world a better place. But that concept is the realm of idealistic children & starry-eyed founders. By the time the Unicorn Juggernaut takes over, “adult supervision” (Sculley, Schmidt, and, yes, Zuck) is brought in, and the company “goes public,” its game over.

Wall Street has the same goal as Capitalism: More More More (Money). Very simple. Morals & Laws are no longer seen as absolutes. They are seen as risk/reward calculations.

<fight club video>

In the words of Ed Norton:

“We know that the design fault is causing fatalities. But… should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.”

In other words: People are dying. But if we make more money by paying the families of the deceased and not fixing the problem, then by all means, keep going.

The tobacco industry played this hand to the edge. Even after hundreds of billions in settlement fines, they’re still doing just fine. Social Media (largely Facebook & Instagram, both Meta subsidiaries, the “last man standing” — R.I.P. MySpace, Tribe, AOL, Google+) followed the exact same roadmap. Meta just paid $2 billion to the state of Texas in cash fines for violating the privacy and identity rights of minors, and there is no doubt that, as other states pile on, those fines will well exceed $10 billion. But what is that to a company making a 30% profit margin, and raking in

The Consumer Metaverse: We’re watching You.

<TBW: You think the Metaverse, like Facebook and Instagram, is “free.” Yet Facebook and Insta earn roughly $15 a month, per user, in cash profit. The old saw of the internet is: “If you think its actually free, then you are in fact the product for sale.”

So think about that. Think about how Meta and Apple are even possibly going to attempt to recoup their >$40B in R&D, and make quarterly revenue from the “supercomputer that you glue to your face.”

Hint: gMail may read (and sell) your emails, and Apple may read (and sell) your iMessages (SMS text messages), but thats just text. What exactly are headsets recording? Hint: eye focus / direction / gaze, pupil dilation, facial expression (emotional indicator), heart rate, respiration, voice, speech, even intonation… ALL THAT.

And all that is for sale… to marketers.

So you think its… ?free?

Yeah, buddy. Keep thinking that.

And be utterly shocked at how much you spend on totally useless product, arriving at your door in brown cardboard and white plastic wrapped boxes, all that stuff that you never knew you needed… until you entered the VR Metaverse…

The Corporate Metaverse: You Have No Choice.

The alternate dark side of this is the corporate metaverse.

At least on the consumer side, you have the illustion of choice. Theoretically, you purchased the headset of your own volition, and you play the games at the time and place of your choosing. It is, largely, a consensual user of time.

But what about front line workers at a mega-corporation, where the highest values are profitability, and efficiency?

What if it was proven that worker bees could increase productivity by >50% if they were to perform their tasks inside a VR headset? What if the lower performing employees could be monitored in such headsets, and culled / terminated?

What if, as part of your job, you were required to wear a VR headset for X hours a day?

This is the very-near-future reality.

Just as workers at the turn of the century were required to have proficiency in Microsoft Office, and to sit in front of CRT screens and keyboards for X hours a day in order to “get their work done,”… the same model will be imposed on worker bees of 2030 and beyond, who as part of condition of their employment, will be required to spend X% of their day…

in the Corporate Metaverse.

Let that sink in.

For reals.

.

.

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prompt: “VR Report Card”

engine: MidJourney 6.1