Why did the metaverse fail?
What went wrong? It's an interesting concept, however, how did Meta end up spending 70B in this project? Using the metahuman, I myself built a whole pipeline that skins and copies blendshapes wit...
Forum Discussion
I think it's a bit early to say "the metaverse has failed". First, you have to define what failure and success looks like in terms of a metaverse. Do we have the metaverse from Snowcrash or Ready Player One? No, of course not. But do remember that technology tends to get built as a long series of incremental stepping stones leading towards a final vision. The challenge is always going to be in execution and also realizing along the way that some of the ideas posed by sci-fi writers are just not feasible in practice.
Do I wish everyone wore full body mocap suits for full body tracking? Sure, that'd be awesome for self expression in VR, but in practice, are people actually going to spend the money buying a mocap suit and putting it on every time they hop into a VR session? Probably not. With every added hardware peripheral, you also get new problems to wrangle: how do you wash the mocap suit without damaging the hardware? How do you support different sizes for different body types? How do you properly calibrate it to various physiologies? And if you support full body mocap suits in your content, how does your content support players who don't have the hardware prereqs? I personally think the metahumans from UE5 are fantastic, and Epic's mocap solutions with live link and integration with existing mocap suits are state of the art, but rendering metahumans in VR on a mobile processor is always going to be a heavy lift and content creators would need to make sacrifices to other parts of the scene. It's worth checking out the meta codec avatars though - I think it's at least on parity with UE5 metahumans, if not better.
I think it's also worth noting how big of a task it is to build VR hardware devices, a content platform, a player ecosystem, and building on the tech to create the next gen hardware at an affordable price point. Everything just has to work perfectly. I'm probably a bit biased, but I think the Quest3 VR headsets are the absolute best in the world and outperform all other headsets across the board. Getting to this stage is always going to cost enormous engineering talent and effort, and there are always going to be small stumbles along the pioneering path as we chart new unexplored territory. It's expected. But we adapt, overcome, and keep building the future, a little wiser than we were yesterday.
I think it should be obvious we are discussing Mark Zuckerberg's Metaverse, not the vision of Steven Spielberg etc.
Anyhoo, email I received today:
Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued
Starting June 15, 2026, you will no longer be able to build, publish or update VR worlds. In addition, you will no longer be able to access Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest headsets. After this date, you can continue to enjoy worlds on the Meta Horizon mobile app.
This change is part of our focus on mobile development, bringing new experiences to even more people. Your Meta Quest headset and other VR apps are unaffected by this change.
We’re grateful for your creativity and participation in Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest.
... so yes, it's "a bit early" to say the Metaverse has failed. Let's say it on June 15th 😄.
(nothing I say here are official statements, this is just me speaking with my insights as a long time VR enthusiast / indie game dev)
I personally never looked deeply into Horizon Worlds. I wouldn't really call it a meta verse in the way scifi writers describe it. I think of the metaverse as more of a store platform + social network, supporting a collection of persistently online VR game worlds (ie, mmorpgs) which offer maximum immersion with cross platform play. Has Meta, Steam, Epic, or Sony made one? Not really. imho, a current problem is that VR is still a very niche market, and for the metaverse to be financially self sustainable, it needs a high enough volume of users. There's probably bigger tough unsolved business problems to handle long before any unsolved tech problems get handled - you can have the right product/service and just be too early to market. In the past, I've seen start ups fail for this exact reason. Will there be a metaverse in the distant future? probably, but it likely won't look like anything any of us can imagine today - its like trying to predict the modern internet in 1995.
