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It’s already the present, but it could change any moment.

We already have tons of examples of metaverses in gaming. MMORPGs, open-world games, and even mobile casual games all revolutionized social metaverses long ago

Virtual and augmented reality are mature technologies. Pokémon Go and AR are practically ancient, and even the mobile Oculus Quest 2 can play some insanely immersive worlds.

I’m a beta user in Facebook Horizons on Oculus. It’s more reminiscent of a rudimentary Minecraft, Roblox, or Decentraland than a real office setting.

The idea that we’re going to use VR headsets the way we use Zoom is ambitious. VR definitely has amazing social use cases, but a work meeting is a waste of time in real life. 

Nobody is going to use it for that – especially not with social audio already proven as a concept by Clubhouse, Discord, Telegram, Skype, Twitter Spaces, Spotify Greenroom, etc.

Reinventing the conference call as through VoIP or an app was a revolutionary technological step. Reimagining it in VR is just stupid.

I saw a ridiculous fundraiser on Clubhouse so people could buy themselves VR headsets. They wanted to meet in VR because Facebook told them to. Nobody is going to fund that nonsense we all know they won’t use to be productive.

Adding VR to a work meeting is reinventing the wheel as a Rube Goldberg machine. Have you ever tried being productive in VR? It’s just not efficient.

It’s not unusual for a tech company to overestimate its place in the future world.

America Online once wanted to be the portal to the entire internet, just like Facebook. It provided everything all in one place, like a virtual mall.

And just like a real life mall, AOL quickly found itself a ghost town. It was outlasted by Yahoo!

Facebook is trying to sell you on every buzzword it can – want a blockchain or crypto? Like gaming and streaming? Watch TV or movies? Text friends? Take pics? Lend family money? Buy things? Do it all on Facebook!

What Facebook is saying when it sells you on its metaverse is that it’s competing with everyone else. Netflix and Facebook both want you to watch movies together on their respective platforms and nowhere else.

Twitter wants you to watch sports and chat aashit it there and nowhere else. Spotify wants you to socialize on site and never leave. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Samsung – they all want you to use their ecosystem as a one-stop shop.

Working as a tech analyst for the past decade, I’ve been hearing about VR workplaces since before there was VR. I have definitely seen some really cool use cases of VR for things such as missile guidance systems built by government contractors here in Arizona. It can be useful in certain situations, but the idea Facebook is selling with Horizon Workspace is ludicrously off base.

Nobody is going to use VR for a meeting, and this was made clear from the pandemic forcing everybody to work from home for at least a little bit. Whether in the office or at home, you’re often multitasking during a conference call. It’s already hard getting people to use video conferencing right.

You need something frictionless, and people are already barely using their cameras during Zoom meetings or Google Hangouts. Sure, a $300 headset could be used for a business meeting. But that doesn’t mean it ever should. There’s too much friction, and some people cut out even with video and audio calls. Adding VR to the mix is just too much unnecessary flair. It’s inventing a problem that doesn’t exist and trying to solve it with a clunky interface that’s nothing like an actual metaverse. Have you actually been in the work version of Horizon in Oculus?

It’s not an open world experience where you can build anything. The Horizon World app is barely even that. Horizon Workspace is exactly what it’s meant to create – a stale office environment. You can’t change much except where you’re sitting. If Facebook employees are forced to actually hold meetings in that, I honestly feel sorry for them. It’s the dumbest use case of VR I could ever imagine.

The only people who will actually get work done in the metaverse as it’s being sold is creators who want to monetize it like we see on Roblox or World of Warcraft. Everybody else is just there for fun or ring to monetize the hype. We barely have public VR people can use for fun. People who bought $2000 headsets two years ago to play games at home never use them. The idea that suddenly everybody is going to take meetings in VR is laughable.

I understand the use cases of VR for a lot of things, but creating a virtual office is never going to happen. This metaverse is not the next coming of the internet, and open world games existed for decades before Mark Zuckerberg or the blockchain bros discovered it. The metaverse is basically Christopher Columbus discovering something that was always there.

Check out Vtube related jobs on Fiverr (designing and rigging VR characters to be used in apps like Vtube, VRChat and anything with Unity, which Horizon does not use). Those artists are the ones who are making a lot of money selling virtual avatars. It’s all for vanity, but I have my own avatars. They’re not NFTs, but I own the full commercial rights to them and they can be transferred anywhere that supports Unity. That technology predates the metaverse, and VRChat is available on Oculus for a much cooler experience.

Facebook is no different, and this metaverse you’re being sold is the same thing that always existed but repackaged to sell you more of it.