Another part of the keynote was a scripted conversation between Meta’s vice president of metaverse, Vishal Shah, and his boss, chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth. After touting the variety of virtual environments that people have created in Horizon Worlds, Shah spoke about how great it will be if people can roam the Internet. The experience, he says, “takes their ability to connect people to another level.” But since your web browser and phone don’t offer an immersive VR screen, it’s the the same level – only you experience it in the steerage, while Quest-equipped users travel in first class. Boz hinted at why Meta might want to invite people to that second-rate experience: “We can’t give everyone an immersive experience,” he said, “but it will be a while before there are enough headsets.”
Whether that’s the right approach or not, it’s one that some VR startups have come to. As hard as it is to give up a fully immersive VR experience, the audience isn’t there yet. One company, Mesmerise, has invested heavily in avoiding the compromises of a hybrid experience. “The perfect scenario is everyone in VR,” said CEO Andrew Hawken. “Anyone giving their undivided attention — you’re all in it together.” But even Hawken admits that too many people think wearing headsets isn’t worth it, and Mesmerise is working on a 2D interface. “The experience is compromised, but we don’t want to exclude people,” he says.
Another VR startup, Spatial, made that decision a while ago. “We thought the computer of the future would be glasses,” said CEO Anand Agarawala. His company built first for Microsoft’s HoloLens, then for Quest headsets, but Spatial never saw his worlds populated with masses of users. “People were hesitant to put on a headset,” Agarawala says. Even when people owned the hardware, when it came time for a meeting, some didn’t have it to hand and others were frustrated installing it. It was so much easier to just do a meeting in Zoom or Teams. So Agarawala created a non-VR means of accessing his virtual worlds and workspaces. It’s not immersive, but people can log in in five seconds. Now, he says, 80 percent of his customers use the internet or mobile. Those people don’t mind if they don’t get an immersive experience because they are in the majority.
Could it be that the metaverse doesn’t need VR after all? For now, even with headsets, current technology leaves some people cold – apparently including people who get paid to work on VR at Meta itself. Recent internal memos written by Shah and leaked to the brink admit Horizon Worlds is plagued with “quality gaps and performance issues”. And Meta struggles to get her own engineers together in VR, despite orders from above that they should. “The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?” Shah wrote. Maybe they will like the web version more.
