Zuckerberg’s recent announcement of Meta, the new brand for Facebook has caused a stir among the XR community. Zuckerberg has been under fire for many months as has Facebook about the data mining activities of the company, and to some extent the new branding and launch of Meta was seen as shadowing the allegations the company is currently facing in the courts.

Gen-Y’s opinion is that Facebook is a platform for boomers, and grandparents who are trying to make connections with youth in their family, although it is hardly a secret that the Gen-Y audience has adopted SNAP, Instagram (also a Facebook asset), Twitter and other competing platforms for their social media activities.

Facebook has managed to retain the younger audience thanks to their acquisition of Instagram which was a smart move at a time when the social media landscape was becoming very competitive.

While on the topic of acquisitions Facebooks takeover of Oculus initially was somewhat hostile with internal disputes between Oculus founders and Zuckerberg and his leadership team. But that is not the focus of this article, the point is that to get to Meta, and the vision that Zuckerberg is now presenting has been a less than smooth journey for the company.

I will say that Meta was not unexpected, in fact I have personally known about this work within Facebook for at least 3 years now, I cant imagine that other industry insiders have not known it was coming!

On the surface it would appear that VR / AR adoption is rising steadily. With Accenture recently purchasing 60,000 Oculus 2 devices for training, sales of the Oculus are looking good, Outside of Oculus, and new software platforms such as Meta, a number of AR glasses have also been released into the market recently.

The problem however is not innovation development, there is significant investment going into innovation in the emerging technologies space especially as it relates to hardware or software offerings. This is confirmed by companies such as Magic Leap who have raised a further 2 billion recently for the development of their second mixed reality device, although the first one hardly made much of an impact in the market regardless of how much money was initially invested.

I believe this lack of traction can be blamed for the poor pricing strategy employed by the company, and later they had to re-work the sales narrative too, “Magic Leap being a device targeted at enterprise users” based on the high price but that did not really change the perception of the company among even the XR audience, and there has been numerous competitive brands that have had better results in the market. Microsoft has done well in the mixed reality space as it relates to enterprise adoption.

The activity surrounding the XR industry especially in the past few months has only exacerbated the hype, where bandwagoners continue to fan the flames of excitement regardless of the generally poor adoption rates as it relates to mainstream device acquisition, at least when compared with mobile devices, no single VR, AR, MR, XR device has yet to achieve the traction that the average smartphone has achieved globally.

The argument can be made however that smartphones have been around longer and people have adjusted to them and that the same might happen for AR/VR.

In the past 2 years the industry can claim that supply chain and manufacturing issues have also impacted availability of stock for XR devices, but the reality of virtual and augmented reality is that these devices were not selling exceptionally even before the pandemic, and the events of the past few years have had little influence on this particular segment of hardware.

Globally only China has really experienced adoption at scale for VR and while I am not personally aware of what the market looks like in China, I have trusted friends from companies such as HTC who inform me that VR technology is widespread in that market.

From a software perspective there has been increases thanks to Steam among other platforms as there are many more VR titles for example and both Android and Apple software ecosystems have been very supportive of AR development. But as SNAP would tell you AR adoption has less to do with devices and more to do with experiences where in todays world Augmented reality is mostly consumed via the smartphone and thanks to applications like theirs, these experiences are device agnostic.

The Metaverse has less to do with devices and more to do with digital environments and experiences within them. While devices are certainly an enabler to access what is being called the metaverse, the average person must understand that the Metaverse in principal is simply an extension of the existing internet in a more interactive or immersive multi-dimensional space, rather than a 2 dimensional space such as a website for example. Perhaps this explanation is a bit over simplified but the target audience for this blog is not the enthusiast but instead the average person so I have tried to simplify the definition as much as I can.

Conceptually the Metaverse has been around for nearly 2 decades now, I say this because the roots of digital environments were developed initially by video game companies. Game companies have innovated technologies such as 3D engines, social engagement and entire economies and currencies within their own games and this is most notable in the genre of Multiplayer online games. Second Life many years ago is one such example where digital assets within 3D environments were first monetized, and this was taking place as early as 2006, Anshe Chung was first among the generation of digital millionaires .

The Metaverse is simply an evolution of many of those past ideas coming together with newer device architectures. The desktop PC or laptop in the past might have been a driver to engage within a digital environment, now its the smartphone or VR/AR headset considered to be the new generation of computing platforms.

The extension of the metaverse as we know it today has come from advancement in devices but also in the creation of digital environments and assets. In the world today there is close to 100 Zettabytes of data, predicted by IDC to grow to over 175 Zettabytes by 2025, this goes to show the sheer quantity of digital assets human kind is producing.

The metaverse has gained more traction as new use cases and applications have been developed in the past 5 or so years showing commercial benefits of this new interactive platform.

VR training is one of the standout examples and has many benefits. The data quality is higher in the metaverse for any type of use case the environments are richer, but this also amounts to higher amounts of data being produced, whether it be through photogrammetry, physics and 3D engines, Raytracing or any other type of content media format. At this moment in time our ability to consume these large amounts of data is not optimal.

Before I deep dive into some of the fundamental technical problems let me share a story with you all.

In 2018, I participated in a panel held at Carnegie Mellon, where the Keynote speaker on the day was from Facebook Reality Labs and we were all there to discuss the adoption of AR/VR. It was then after witnessing firsthand the technology that Facebook was working on, I realized that their plans for creating Meta was inevitable, it was not a case of if, but when!

Using AI, and photogrammetry with nearly 1000 or more cameras simultaneously taking shots Facebook Labs had created virtually identical digital twins of people, from nearly every possible ethnic background and with human like interactions. These were not cartoon avatars, they were as real as you and me but in a digital environment. The sheer compute processing power to render each an every human like digital twin was immense, hence why this level of technology as yet cannot be deployed to a mainstream environment.

At this event however the most profound moment was not related at all to the Keynote about the technology Facebook Labs was developing nor was it about the feedback us panelists gave about how VR/AR would impact industry, but instead it was a question from an audience member.

An African American lady stood up in front of a crowd of nearly 400 business leaders in attendance from Pittsburgh, she was the mayor of a small city in the greater Pittsburgh area, and in an emotional statement she said:

If ever there was a moment where time stood still, this was it, if ever there was a reality check this was it! and for me it was that moment that highlighted above everything else why the evolution of the metaverse was not taking place quickly.

While the point she made was related more to equity and inclusion or the lack of it, there were deeper issues in a number of areas to then explore which relate to reasons why any technology transformation and widescale adoption is difficult and this is related more to social or economic issues than technological ones.

When I think about the amount of capital companies like Magic Leap have raised {in excess of 6 billion at this point} and the little they have truly achieved I cant help but think that the money would have been better spent giving scholarships for comp sci degrees to 58,800 students from poorer communities across the US based on the fact that an average 4 year degree in IT costs about 102k and the talent deficit nationwide in the IT sector is significant.

These issues affect technology adoption and industry transformation including talent development among other things, we cant fix one problem by simply creating another and as it stands for the majority of communities, and small businesses spread across the world, the barrier to entry is the cost and lack of access.

As per the lady’s statements above about not having reliable internet in her community, it is no secret that the majority of states and cities across the United States have aging infrastructure, this story is repeated not only in the US but several countries all over the world. More modern infrastructure is found often in places like Dubai or Beijing where these economies have invested in infrastructure development in the past 30 years that has exceeded that of many other cities. For the rest of us though most of the infrastructure we deal with is at least 100 years old or more to overhaul it presents its own significant challenges, investment is one of them.

On the topic of investment though we have to wonder what makes corporations tick? When a wireless carrier for example claims to be spending 50 billion dollars on 5G infrastructure yet somehow most of our neighborhoods lack access to decent wireless or fiber connections, we wonder what’s going on.

I have also heard in more recent times that many communications companies do not feel the value proposition exists for them, and yet they still sell $1000 smartphone’s via their retailers in poorer communities but cant seem to put up an antenna to provide a service which can fully utilize the power of that device, the hypocrisy is real!

Elon Musk's starlink is supposed to fix the internet coverage issues and also offer the opportunity to deploy these services affordably, but that will take time to deploy. As it stands most of our wireless infrastructure is terrestrial, and I somehow have my doubts that a billionaire such as Musk would employ a democratized model for internet access, we shall wait and see.

What does this have to do with the metaverse you ask and why should we care? Well if half the population in the world does not have access to reliable connectivity they wont be able to use any of these new devices in AR or VR any time soon, in the same wave of thinking access to tech is one of the last things on their minds when access to decent education and opportunities for employment tend to dictate whether people can or cant participate in a tech based economy.

While large corporations are making the investment into emerging technologies, 80% of the worlds businesses are not large corporations, most are small businesses and these small businesses do not have the deep pockets like Walmart or Accenture to simply go out and buy 10s of thousands of VR headsets and deploy training solutions.

It has taken time for computing to become mainstream, but since the 1980s and thanks to the efforts of many companies like Microsoft, Dell and HP now computers are quite common in nearly all businesses, and the productivity tools they offer are also considered important such as email for example.

For emerging technology platforms it is often harder for companies to develop compelling use cases. And numerous new technologies have been thrust upon companies all at once, the problem therefore is where to start, what to invest in and why.

Fundamentally in industries such as manufacturing for example, digital twins, sensors, and augmented reality solutions can have an impact on operational efficiency, VR can impact training and the conversion of tribal knowledge to digital training will be one of the most important cultural shifts we will see in the next decade.

Companies who are cognizant to talent development and know the importance of attracting youth to their career boards, also understand the role technology has to play and realize that the old methods of teaching the job might not be effective anymore.

If the metaverse is supposed to be an evolution in how we work, live and play then solutions providers in the space have to make it work for big and small businesses alike. It will not happen from a top down strategy but instead needs to be driven from a bottom up approach!

What most people do not understand about the metaverse is that the design in itself needs to be ubiquitous, The network cannot and should not be controlled by any one company or government, the infrastructure itself needs to be decentralized from the outset. Facebook or Meta cannot think that it will create its own version of this which might sit alongside other versions made by other software companies.

More things to consider is that everything from e-commerce, to e-learning, within the metaverse will eventually replace what we know today as banking and schooling there are many more areas here but I only mention two as an example. The metaverse is an alternative, hence it disrupts everything as we know, in order to reinvent it into something better.

From a purely binary point of view it is humans who slow down the transformation of the metaverse and not the metaverse itself that is slow to evolve. But such societal disruption at this point in time would be offensive to so many, we can simply not re-educate the current generation to accept this change.

Therefore my hypothesis is that the metaverse in its full effect will be something that is utilized more by the time my own child is an adult lets say 20 years from now, at which point an entire generation of youth would have grown up with the metaverse rather than having to adapt to it or see it as disruptive.

The metaverse is not only about AR/VR either, the metaverse at its core is about singularity when technology is uncontrollable and irreversible changing human civilization as we know it, it is about AI, Robotics, Machine Learning, Extended Reality, Blockchain, 5G+, smart technology (cities, transportation etc.) and many other emerging technologies all working together to advance mankind.

We at the tipping point of history where we can choose to fear or embrace what is to come the choice is ours.

Metaverse! Transformational Challenges Ahead… was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.