Interface to the Metaverse (yeah yeah yeah, virtual worlds)
There is no doubt that AR and VR are the shiny technologies of the future to interface with users, and I’ve been a fan of VR since playing ‘Dactyl Nightmare back in ‘91 and then I had a VIVE headset show up at my house the day they launched. Huge fan.
The future of the metaverse is cell phones, at least in terms of the volume of users, followed by PCs. For the next 5-10 years, anything else is a novelty. It may be a novelty with a very high value per user, but those users will be measured in the millions and not the billions of users that will show up on their phone.
So, first and foremost, if you want to do things at scale, whatever you build in the metaverse will have a strong server component and some great new technology stacks, but it is going to talk HTML to cell phones, or something very much like that. That said, it isn’t super exciting to talk about since we’ve all see what this looks like.
So you are going to see VR and AR start to take off, serving not just millions of users, but more importantly, millions of users who have demonstrated a willingness to dispose of their income towards this new technology, so they will individually be interesting sources of revenue. FB for example makes about $11 per user per year, but Apple has 825 million users paying at least a few dollars per month in subscription revenue.
Virtual Reality, a closed off visual environment that fully replaces your vision, is clearly limited in where it can be deployed. You can’t walk very far without running into stuff, so you are going to be in specially designated rooms, probably alone, and just interacting via the internet. With luck we will get better controls and possibly even treadmills to let you pretend to be in a much larger open space, and obviously graphics and latency will improve. While we may see some use for these devices in the workplace, I would expect it to be primarily for gamers, either action oriented or just people wanting to have completely virtual interactions. VR can go a long way, but I’d imagine that it stays in a few markets like entertainment and communications. Could we go shopping in VR? Sure, but I’m not sure it has compelling value beyond what you get from a web page, at least for most products.
I saw a comment the other day that if you want to invest in the future of widely adopted VR, you should buy stock in companies that sell anti-nausea medication. While amusing, it is at least partly true. Even as the technology improves, I think there will be a limited market for people who are willing to spend 8+ hours a day wearing a VR headset.
I think the part that changes how the world works will be Augmented Reality, landing with the wealthy first, but eventually being something that is nearly as main-stream as phones are today, it will just take at least a decade to get there. Imagine a pair of glasses that is able to overlay information onto the world around you, providing what we might think of as a heads up display for your view into the world, combining personal information and publicly provided information to help you in your day to day life. It will be important to determine what can be controlled by the user and what is pushed onto you, but just some examples:
Navigation instructions, for walking, driving public transit, or otherwise.
Names of people you are talking to, your very own contact management system showing for each person you meet.
Notifications of relevant data for the exact time and place you are right now.
Overlays and easy access to information about any items you can see, perhaps when shopping you can see prices, sales, even user reviews just by looking at a product on the shelf.
So to go a bit further I think there is a really interesting aspect to AR/VR, and that is about how to defray the cost of these systems in order to drive adoption. Imagine that you have two products, one that sells for $1000, and another that sells for $100, but that provide a similar experience.
The premium $1000 device would have a powerful processor, and probably be more stylish to fit the market, but would communicate over 6G to pull in information, process it to adapt to your requests and your needs, and drive the display locally. You would be in control of the experience, at least as well as you are with your phone today.
The $100 device would only be capable of displaying the signal sent to it, effectively a dumb device that is rendering content processed by a powerful machine in the cloud and streamed to you constantly, on that same 6G network. It would have slightly higher latency, jittering a bit if you turn your head too fast, but more importantly, paying for itself by taking away some of your control, showing advertisements, monetizing your behavior by tracking you, and generally turning you into the product as much as being a product that you own. Stop accepting that level of control, and you probably violate your purchase contract and the device ceases to function.
Is this a bit dystopian? Perhaps, but we already have exactly this kind of market segmentation with televisions, and it is something we can expect to continue in the future. That $300 55” LCD TV you just bought already considers you the product, it just lives in your house and consumes your electricity.
