The Metaverse is officially dead. Now it can finally be built.
Meta Vice President Vishal Shah gets rid of the Metaverse in an interview - sort of. This is the best thing that could happen to the Metaverse.
Ask ten people what the Metaverse is, and you'll get an average of three entirely different answers and seven blank looks. The Metaverse was introduced with much fanfare and a bold rebranding as a meta-market fad.
This resulted in a wild frenzy of "We are the Metaverse" proclamations from all directions and businesses. Ronny Abovitz, who failed with Magic Leap, is tinkering with his Xverse, in which there are supposed to be gradations of sentience and autonomy. Sony - surprisingly - believes in the metaverse as an intense entertainment experience.
Microsoft's Nadella sees the physical and virtual worlds merging, primarily in the area of business applications. Nvidia's Jensen Huang sees the Metaverse - Nvidia calls it "Omniverse" - as an "overlay on the physical world" that will merge areas such as social, gaming, and industry.
According to Jason Rubin, people will only need to leave the Metaverse for basic needs, but will spend their entire work and life in it, even getting married. And Epic CEO Sweeney says they already have plenty of metaverses with Fortnite & Co.
However entertaining that may be to read in summary, it's tiring to hear it in countless variations every day. After all, no one has yet come up with a definition that the world could agree on. Particular interests and competitive thinking have turned the idea of the metaverse into a cake that everyone bakes for themselves and sells as the only true cake. Those who see parallels to organized religions are not too far off.
But now this is officially over, also because Meta has gone into turtle mode in its rather unclear marketing of the Metaverse for now. The triumph of artificial intelligence certainly had something to do with the change in strategy. In an interview at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech Conference, Meta Vice President Vishal Shah buried the Metaverse: "The Metaverse hype is dead."
Oh, wait. It's not the Metaverse that's dead. The hype is officially dead - my bad, how did I miss that? But this is damn good news for immersionists everywhere.
Because now we can catch up on what was always missing: The development of a vision and the planning of its implementation - focused on the needs of the users and with a communication strategy that explains the point of a metaverse.
Because without picking people up in their real life and giving them a comprehensible answer to the question "Why do I need the metaverse", this idea will never work.
What idea? I'm glad you asked. Here is my definition of the Metaverse: The Metaverse is the extension of physical reality to include digital content, and it includes the ability to digitally travel to physical locations and interact with other people in their real space.
So, that leaves six clueless looking people to come up with a definition.
There's plenty of time to do that, now that the topic of the metaverse has finally disappeared into the workshop, and its technical foundations can be worked out in peace, without having "metaverse-ready" LAN cables constantly aimed at me.
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