Here's some good weekend reading from Avi Bar-Zeev (previously featured here), an XR pioneer with serious cred who after working and consulting on XR projects with Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Linden Lab in the early years, likely knows about anything in the space worth knowing. And his forecast of what Facebook plans to do with its XR projects (such as the recently-announced Horizon Workrooms, not to mention Zuckerberg saying Facebook is becoming a Metaverse company) is decidedly Cassandra-ish:
We’re at a critical inflection point. This ultra high-tech ad-driven machine, epitomized by Facebook, represents a new kind of Trojan horse that we’ve only just recently welcomed into our world. Night is falling and the sacking has barely begun. In the future, we run the risk of being so entranced by our shiny new gifts that we lose the will to fight entirely.
On the other hand, if Facebook and others really become true privacy-first, consumer-first companies with business models that reinforce it, if they listen to criticism and welcome independent oversight, they could still become the core companies we depend on, with enough meaningful introspective data and the right protections to actually make our lives better than today.
I just hit up Avi to quibble a bit with his roadmap; while it looks roughly plausible to me, I spy some problems for Facebook's plans: For instance, Quest 2 sales are slow, the PSVR is giving them heavy competition, and Horizon (from what I'm told) is having development challenges; and now, a lot of people are laughing at that Workroom thing. Wouldn't all that change this roadmap?
Avi's take:
"I don't think it changes much. They need to make this work and they'll keep trying until someone does it better and then they'll copy or buy them unless they legally can't anymore.
"I do think they have a big problem with Quest to break out of the console market and a natural plateau of customers. But they have 5 years to try.
"Their single biggest strength (and the biggest threat to society in my opinion) is that they're targeting an unbeatable low price with ad subsidies."
My strong sense is the Quest 2 won't sell much better if it was priced lower, even if it was given out for nearly free, but we'll see. Meantime read the rest of Avi's forecast here. (Image via that post!)
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