Opinion Could the recent death of Meta's unloved and unused Horizon Worlds signal the demise of the wider metaverse?
Reading Neal Stephenson's post on the topic, you might think so. After all, if the man who coined the term "metaverse" reckons it's dead and buried, who are we to argue?
As someone who has a bit of prior art in the field – building networked consumer VR systems for Sega before Stephenson set pen to paper – I can tell you what Neal got right, what he got wrong, and how he's missed the point he himself made.
Stephenson says no one will wear VR headgear. That's always been true, because crossing the boundary between digital and biology is never easy.
Very early VR hardware like the head-mounted display Ivan Sutherland produced in the 1960s earned the nickname "Sword of Damocles" because he mounted its motion-tracking armature on the ceiling.
The first recognizably modern VR system, the 40-year-old VIEW system NASA developed to train astronauts for extra-vehicular activities, was also uncomfortable. It was only tolerable because the alternative involved donning scuba gear and floating in a giant fishbowl – an impossibility in orbit when astronauts needed to rehearse a mission.
Jaron Lanier may have been the first individual to employ VR as a creative medium, using it as an artist's tool. Char Davies followed that path – and won a Prix Ars Electronica for her fully immersive OSMOSE, art with a unique quality of experience born out of immersion, repeating the pattern established with VIEW.
Sometimes immersion is the only way to do things.
VIEW and OSMOSE both required "immersants" to suit up: goggles, trackers, headphones. OSMOSE also required a band to measure the expansion of your chest cavity, enabling you to "float" in the virtual environment like a scuba diver in a water column. That's a lot of kit – and, 30 years ago, it needed to be powered by a supercomputer.
Fast-forward to 2014, when two engineers mounted the stage at Google I/O and introduced Google Cardboard: 50 cents' worth of folded pizza boxes and plastic lenses turning any reasonably capable smartphone into a full-blown VR headset.
In a flash, the number of VR systems went from a few thousand to a few billion, enabling enthusiasts to create a wealth of interesting things with very little infrastructure. Thanks to Google Cardboard, VR became commonplace.
Most of what happened post-Cardboard centered on refining the experience, making it smaller, lighter, and less likely to make users feel sick. Part of the appeal must be that it won't cause motion sickness.
That's not a new thing. Motion sickness led to the cancellation of the Sega VR project I worked on back in 1993, and it affects many people who use immersive virtual reality. That's a big reason people don't like headsets. They tried it once and it made them sick. Who wants to use tech that makes them nauseous? (We already have X for that.)
The surest path to nausea-free immersion leads through augmented reality. Keeping people in the real world – with some synthetic additions – grounds them in a way that VR can't. Even the best "pass-through" systems, such as Apple Vision Pro and Samsung XR, still feel a bit weird. Most folks can only tolerate using them for about an hour.
Yet augmented reality can only work if it's continuously mapping the environment. Every AR system must be a surveillance system (the main point of a book that I wrote in 2020). That's not malevolence, it's engineering practice. So there's the paradox: to get the kind of immersion our bodies can tolerate, we need to give ourselves over to total surveillance.
Stephenson reckons that's too big an ask, imagining public reaction against "glassholes" as real and permanent.
Yet he also makes an observation about the "software metaverse" that undermines his argument. Nobody visited Horizon Worlds because there was no reason to go there. Meanwhile, millions enjoy Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite every hour of the day because these metaverses offer fun things to do.
So what happens when we reach the happy combination of a "good enough" pair of spectacles and a killer app? That's when Stephenson will learn it's never been about the device. It's about what the device enables us to do.
When AR spectacles and a "killer app" come together, the whole thing takes off. Just like AI and OpenClaw. Which reminds me: the only technology that has died more times than the metaverse is artificial intelligence. And that seems to have worked out. ®
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