Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s particular view of the future, an awful lot of money is sloshing around the world of virtual reality at the moment, mostly because of the tech investment community’s unending appetite for anything that can be tied into whatever the Metaverse is this week. Naturally, all this makes Meta an even bigger target for opprobrium than usual, with criticisms landing on its social-centred Horizon Worlds initiative in particular. It has put some advocates in the VR community, including Rolf Illenberger, CEO of enterprise-focused software company VRdirect, into defensive mode, demanding more patience from the community at large. “We’re trying to land on the Moon,” he said recently, “and people are complaining that the coffee machine’s not working.”
It’s a fair point on one hand, but the problem with VR’s second coming, really, is that it’s felt compromised from the beginning. Pretty much everyone involved couched their early efforts in language along the lines of, “Well, of course this is just where we are at the moment – imagine what the technology will be like in five or ten years”. And it turns out that this is really hard to sell. Compare it to when Steve Jobs held up an iPhone on stage for the first time in 2007. The benefits of Apple’s approach were immediately obvious, and didn’t require caveats about it being merely the company’s first run at this. The outstanding success since speaks for itself.