Meta's New Vision of the Future Doesn't Mention the Metaverse Even Once

In case you missed it, Meta CTO and Reality Labs' head Andrew Bosworth recently published the company's vision of the future:

Meta began 2022 with a new name and a new vision for the future, and at Reality Labs it’s our job to bring that vision to life. We never thought it would be easy or straightforward, but this year was even harder than we expected. Economic challenges across the world, combined with pressures on Meta’s core business, created a perfect storm of skepticism about the investments we’re making...

[W]e’ve made tough calls this year to stop doing some work so we can maintain focus on those things we feel are most important. But I can say with confidence that after one of the hardest years in the history of the company, Meta remains as committed to our vision for the future as we were on the day we announced it.

Bosworth proceeds to lay out the company's confidence in its vision, in which VR/AR and mixed reality displays will become a pervasive part of computing.

Notable in its absence:

This new vision of the future from Meta.

Does not mention.

"The Metaverse".

Not even once.

See for yourself.

Which is pretty interesting! After all, the link in the very first line, "Meta began 2022 with a new name and a new vision", leads to this post from last year:

Connect 2021: Our vision for the metaverse

Today at Connect 2021, Mark Zuckerberg laid out our vision of the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet — a set of interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you can’t do in the physical world. Importantly, it’ll be characterized by social presence, the feeling that you’re right there with another person, no matter where in the world you happen to be. In keeping with that vision, he also announced a new brand for our company, Meta, to better reflect our focus moving forward. This is an exciting new chapter for the company, and we’re excited to help bring the metaverse to life.

Along with the title itself, the 2021 post mentions "the metaverse" twelve times. It's quite something to go from a dozen to, well, zero.

The 2022 absence of "the metaverse" leaves one to wonder whether it is one of the things Meta decided to "stop doing some work" on. Not to mention John Carmack, who once called creating the Metaverse "a moral imperative", just resigned his executive consultant position from Meta. 

And Horizon Worlds, Meta's metaverse platform, only gets one mention in the 2022 post. This:

It’s not often you get to witness a whole new form of self-expression and community building emerge on a platform, and the ways creators worked their magic on Horizon Worlds this year was a thing to behold.

One wonders how Horizon Worlds' community feels when they only rate a single sentence.

The irony? Metaverse platforms have already become the leading use case for Meta's Quest.  Some 3 million Quest 2 users are active users of Rec Room, and based on my research, VRChat is even more popular with Quest 2 users. Their popularity is so pronounced, Carmack (when he was still at Meta) openly stated it was the reason for Quest 2 now costing more.

The second irony: Augmented reality has even less mass market appeal than VR. Quest 2 has an install base of around 15 million, which isn't huge, but no AR headset comes close. AR/XR applications are not even popular on the iPhone, which has had the technology integrated in it for years. (As I often say: The AR "market" on the iPhone is Pokémon GO... and only Pokémon GO.)  

All that to one side, maybe Meta will reaffirm its commitment to the Metaverse in another announcement? Or explain why they've walked away from that term? I'm reaching out a Meta spokesperson and will update this post if I get a reply.

Comments

[Adeon]

Very smart considering how poisoned of a word it is. No one else who knows what they’re doing in VR wants to be associated or wants to use it, shouldn’t expect Meta to either.

[Mark Billinghurst]

Great article, but I'm not sure it's true that "AR/XR applications are not even popular on the iPhone". Tell that to SnapChat who have over 350 million daily active users of AR lenses. Not to mention Facebook camera, Google maps live view and all of the other mobile AR applications.

Given that there are over 1 Billion AR capable mobile phones, it's clear that the mobile AR users dwarf VR users for now.

However, you're right that HMD based AR is lagging far behind VR HMD uptake. I suspect that will change over the long term.

[Martin K.]

It's been an interesting year in AR/VR/XR. And I feel that Andrew Bosworth is lagging behind with his processing of 2022. Let me give some examples:

As we reported in our Q3 results this October, daily active users on Facebook were at an all-time high, with positive engagement trends.

This is the one time that Facebook was mentioned. And I'm sure that it is true in some sense; but try to find the 4(!) most recent episodes of Bosworth's own podcast on its Facebook page ( https://www.facebook.com/boztothefuturepod ), and it feels as if he hasn't looked at the Facebook page of his own(!) podcast for about half a year. Or worse: he has looked at it and just doesn't care about it.

The good news is that in the long run, we think 2022 will be remembered as a year when foundational pieces of technology enabling our vision for the future made their way into the hands of developers and users for the first time.

As untrue and cringeworthy as this sentence is, it's almost comical in its limited horizon where "developers and users" is meant to mean "developers and users on Meta platforms". And given this year's leaks of Meta Quest 3, I'm wondering: what will people actually remember of the Meta Quest Pro once Meta releases a Meta Quest 3 that is superior in many ways at a fraction of the price of the Quest Pro just 12 months later?

giving you a glimpse of the future AR vision we’re building for.

Which is illustrated by a video that mainly shows orbiting and bouncing balls and virtual indoor plants. Really? That's the "future AR vision" you are building for? This is almost worse than the AR demo of Beat Saber in Zuckerberg's keynote ( https://youtu.be/hvfV-iGwYX8?t=3197 ). The current winter storm in the US should remind everyone how important AR (including "conformal head-up displays") is for air planes to land safely in low visibility conditions. There are excellent examples of uses of AR technology today. Why is Meta unable to show off some decent examples? And why are Zuckerberg and Bosworth apparently unaware of how cringeworthy their examples are?

It won’t be long before a VR headset is capable of emulating a powerful home computer setup, from a device that fits in a backpack and can be used anywhere. The journey toward that type of device took a big step forward with Quest Pro this year.

Keyword: "emulating"; not actually being a powerful computer setup, but "emulating" one. The difference might be that the emulation does not offer all the software that makes a computer setup actually useful. For example, productivity software by Microsoft. Wait? Why is Microsoft not mentioned at all? Did Bosworth forget about one of the biggest announcements in Zuckerberg's Connect 2022 keynote? Or is that no longer part of Meta's future?

And 2022 was a great year for VR developers. We saw game developers continue their incredible streak of innovation that is shaping the future of their industry. Social experiences became the most popular apps on the Quest Store, ...

Yeah, no, most of 2022 has been marked by the declining interest in the idea of the "Metaverse" and with that declining interest in metaverse apps, like Rec Room: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fg%2F11f3mbzk_k . (Most of 2022's decline in the graph is a seasonal effect, but year-over-year interest also fell, which is uncommon for Rec Room.)

It’s not often you get to witness a whole new form of self-expression and community building emerge on a platform, and the ways creators worked their magic on Horizon Worlds this year was a thing to behold. We’re going to spend 2023 focused on helping this community flourish.

The actual alarming sentence is the second one. Or rather, that the second sentence does not mention work on improvements of Horizon Worlds itself. Is Bosworth not aware of what creators in Horizon Worlds think of its product quality? See this discussion for background: https://www.facebook.com/groups/horizonwaffles/posts/2302319146588258/

Meta is far from the only company working on pushing the boundaries here, and we expect to see new competitors joining us in building for AR and VR next year.

Is it arrogant or ignorant not to mention other AR/XR devices that are on the market? Like Varjo XR-3, Tilt Five Glasses, Pico 4, etc.? Or is it just a cheap attempt to manipulate readers into thinking that Meta was leading the market of AR/XR devices?

I guess, Bosworth has to present a very biased view of reality. But at some point, one really has to wonder whether some of the omissions are deliberate or whether he actually doesn't know what's going on.

[Adeon Writer]

“ One wonders how Horizon Worlds' community feels when they only rate a single sentence.”

There is no community to feel it! Honestly. No one’s using it.