But is the metaverse really already dead?

A few days after announcing the closure of AltSpaceVR (the virtual reality social environment purchased in 2017), Microsoft has decided to close the entire department for the development of its so-called industrial metaverse after only four months, laying off around 100 people. Already a few months ago, however, Tinder had decided to give up its ambitious (and paradoxical) metaverse-style projects.

The second thoughts also involved the company that more than any other has bet its future on this vision, namely Meta. First came the post in which Andrew Bosworth, technical manager of Meta’s Reality Labs, talked about the company’s future projects without ever mentioning the metaverse, then it turned out that the same employees of the company founded by Mark Zuckerberg were very skeptical about the whole affair.

In fact, according to an anonymous poll on Blind, 56% of Meta employees think Zuckerberg hasn’t “clearly explained what the metaverse is,” while 58% believe “the metaverse won’t reach a billion users in the next decade” ( in November 2021 this percentage was 40%). In all of this, it is known that Meta’s main project in this area, namely Horizon Worlds, has gone from 300 thousand to 200 thousand users during 2022 and has greatly disappointed expectations.

As important as these incidents are, they are not enough by themselves to put an end to the ambitious and (all too) varied metaverse project. As Harry McCracken pointed out in his Plugged In newsletter, “declining interest in a technology category is not proof that it is destined to fade away forever. The decades-old industry of artificial intelligence is known for having faced multiple phases in which pessimism towards its potential held sway”. However, it is precisely the comparison with artificial intelligence that is particularly merciless. Unlike the metaverse, which has generated disproportionate expectations regarding the progress and adoption of various projects, deep learning has truly changed the world over the past decade, being integrated with enormous success in an ever-increasing number of domains and evolving relentlessly , as recently demonstrated by a tool like ChatGPT.

Although ChatGPT and Generative AI in general have also received their share of excessive expectations, it is nothing comparable to the clamor generated by the metaverse, which has managed to make people believe – with advertising and marketing campaigns – that indeed, an immersive and open virtual reality environment already existed in which to transfer a part of our daily life (while in reality there were only various platforms that were extremely different from each other and which in most cases did not even use virtual reality).

Tomorrow’s medicine and the metaverse

by Massimo Canducci

18 November 2022

Feeding excessive expectations can only turn out to be a boomerang when one is promised – as Zuckerberg did in 2021 – to be able to participate with one’s avatar in a concert that physically takes place in some arena, without appreciable differences from who is actually there. Something that – as McCracken always wrote – “has as much foundation in reality as the time machine or the shrinking ray”.

The same notion was reiterated in Forbes: “After eight years of development and spending billions of dollars, this sci-fi concept looks like it’s maybe 2 percent done. The basic problem with places like Horizon Workrooms (the “metaverse” intended for business meetings) or Horizon Worlds (the more social one) is that they are terribly ugly, barely functional and are fertile grounds for social interactions which, at best cases, they are awkward and clumsy.”

Is this really the end of the metaverse? It depends on what is meant: Mark Zuckerberg’s colossal project based on virtual reality could also turn out to be a failure, but the same certainly cannot be said of many other realities that have been labeled as such (just think of the sensational successes of Roblox and Fortnite), while the same virtual reality video games in which it is also possible to interact with other users (such as Population One or Echo VR, which only subsequently fell into the metaverse category) will continue to fascinate a growing share of gamers.

Probably, the best thing would be to decree the end of the word “metaverse”: a term that is too vague, confusing, which allows us to imagine something that does not exist today and which encompasses extremely different environments and experiences. On the other hand, when you want to pass through the metaverse even a simple virtual reality platform for flight training, or games that have been around for over a decade like Minecraft (and which aren’t even in virtual reality), it means that you the string is too tight.