Mainstream metaverse a ways off

Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash

On November 30, the European Commission's foreign aid department hosted a party in the metaverse. Setting up this virtual space apparently cost €387,000. It was a way to get young people excited about the EU.

Five people showed up. Oof.

As we all know, Meta is one of the companies full steam ahead on the metaverse thing. But this is a very long play, and there's an important analogy between the creation of the metaverse and its ubiquity. The conditions that made Facebook and social media burst onto the scene 15 years ago.

We're probably at least 5 years away from the metaverse being a viable thing with a critical mass of users.

One of the reasons for that is that VR tech is expensive, not intuitive to use and therefore not at all ubiquitous.

But before we go any further on this we need to go back to 2007. The year the snowball that was social media really started rolling. Do you know what was ubiquitous in 2007?

Mobile phones.

And what was just on the cusp of being in nearly everyone's hands?

Smartphones.

The tech was intuitive (there's an app for that!), and the interface was so simple that an adult could figure it out (children don't even need to teach us).

Plus the pool of early adopters and influencers for social large—from Ivy League students and eventually most North American university students on Facebook, to tech geeks and journalists getting the hang of Twitter early on.

Before the metaverse can be a thing there needs to be a critical mass VR early adopters—and I think it's getting there.

But perhaps more importantly, the hardware needs to be cheaper. Until every cellphone provider or ISP offers VR hardware for $0*, the metaverse won't be mainstream.

(BTW I know all too well how disruptive true, non-Blackberry smartphones were. I was once the co-founder of a startup that was trying to solve peer-to-peer scheduling using SMS, and then smartphones appeared. So we folded up shop and focused on OilersNation instead.)

Anyway, who wants to buy me a VR rig for Christmas?

*as long as you sign up for a minimum of two years.