Thoughts on Meta's push for VR
or, why I think VR isn't as stupid as everyone else seems to
I. A friend of mine asked me about Meta the other day:
It’s actually a pretty good question, one that a lot of people outside of the tech world (and a fair number inside) seem to have trouble grasping. I’m by no means the first person to take a stab at why pushing VR might be a reasonable business strategy — I recommend reading Ben Thompson for that. Still, I wrote up a comprehensive enough take that I figured it would be easy to just copy paste it here for future reference.
II. I think there are broadly two reasons why Meta is pushing to make the metaverse a thing.
The first has to do with access.
Google and Apple, both arguably Meta competitors, have a fair bit of vertical integration -- they have phones, operating systems on those phones, and browsers, which means that you cannot avoid being in their ecosystem if you are anywhere in that supply chain. Meta has none of this. They just have software. And even though that software is dominant, it is not invulnerable from attacks one level down.
An example of this is Apple pushing out changes to the ability of third party applications to scrape data for advertising. Quoting directly from Business Insider:
But Meta has a much bigger problem: Its so-called family of apps, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, are "at the whim of Apple," in the words of a top Meta exec in a recent internal posting reported by Recode.
In 2021, Apple changed its iOS operating system to limit the abilities of apps to track user behavior. In February of 2022, Meta projected that the changes would cost it $10 billion, on account of how much more difficult it's become to target ads to iPhone users. Apple CEO Tim Cook, for his part, has criticized Facebook's business model several times over the years, with Apple going so far as to declare privacy a "human right."Though Meta has spent a very long time trying to become a platform — a place where other developers can make revenue, like Windows or Unity/Unreal or the App Store — they have ended up becoming another advertising behemoth. That financial model is reasonably good, but (as above) it has some tricky dependencies that platforms don’t have.
To make matters worse, Meta has to already compete with Amazon and Google for advertising dollars from its customers. More recently it has also had to deal with (the almost certainly state backed) Tiktok muscling in on its golden goose. Notice that Google never has to worry about this — even if you don’t actually use Google Search, Google will still get it’s cut of your data through Chrome or Android.
So Meta is in a position of not having hardware that they can push to ensure the continued protection of their ads engine. Google was in the same position when the iPhone came out, but they responded quickly. First with Android, then with Motorola integrations, and finally with Pixel. Now, it’s ten years later — Meta is way too late to the phone device/OS game to really make a dent there1
If you can’t capture the previous wave, maybe you can ride the next one. And though it’s not really clear what the next wave even is, VR is as reasonable a bet as anything else. In some ways, VR fits a lot of the patterns that phones had -- in its current iteration it is bulky and it doesn’t do all that much, but some people can see a future in them, they just need the right form factor, the tech is getting cheaper, etc. etc. Maybe if Meta get ahead of it they can own that whole market. Maybe they can create for VR what the iPhone was for smartphones2.
So to sum it up, the first reason why Meta is pushing for the metaverse is because they need strategic protection of their advertising moat, and hardware control is a solid way to achieve that.
The second reason is maybe a bit less MBA-business-strategy, and a bit more emotional and philosophical. Anyone who owns a VR set will tell you that these things are magical. It’s just really really cool when it all works. Don’t get me wrong, there are ton of ways in which it doesn’t work — it’s annoying to setup, the wires are clunky, it gets too hot, you get motion sick when you use it.
But when it works, it’s super compelling, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that VR is responsible for the most incredible digital experiences I’ve ever had3. I don’t know that there’s all that much more to say about the VR on its own, except that you really just have to try it out.
III. I will say that I personally dont agree broadly with the idea of a 'metaverse' as a social application -- that is, some big social playground where a lot of people can hang out in VR. It’s too hard to compete with all of the other ways in which people prefer to hang out. Maybe once VR becomes seamless, the metaverse as a social technology will become more applicable. But in my humble opinion, I think right now social media VR is a dead end. I just would much rather talk to someone — literally anyone — in person than be an embodied avatar in a digital space4. That’s not to say that I don’t have an online social life. I play a TON of video games online for example — Civ, obviously, but many others. But I don’t need VR for those activities. And if I’m just sitting around and talking, it’s not clear how much VR is adding on top
Instead, I think that VR could really take off as a form of AR. The Apple Vision Pro actually gets this right — Ben Thompson, again:
Apple Vision is technically a VR device that experientially is an AR device, and it’s one of those solutions that, once you have experienced it, is so obviously the correct implementation that it’s hard to believe there was ever any other possible approach to the general concept of computerized glasses.
This reality — pun intended — hits you the moment you finish setting up the device, which includes not only fitting the headset to your head and adding a prescription set of lenses, if necessary, but also setting up eye tracking (which I will get to in a moment). Once you have jumped through those hoops you are suddenly back where you started: looking at the room you are in with shockingly full fidelity.
What is happening is that Apple Vision is utilizing some number of its 12 cameras to capture the outside world, and displaying them to the postage-stamp sized screens in front of your eyes in a way that makes you feel like you are wearing safety goggles: you’re looking through something, that isn’t exactly like total clarity but is of sufficiently high resolution and speed that there is no reason to think it’s not real.But why go through all the hoops of full VR when you could just let a user see through a glass screen?
The payoff is the ability to then layer in digital experiences into your real-life environment: this can include productivity applications, photos and movies, conference calls, and whatever else developers might come up with, all of which can be used without losing your sense of place in the real world. To just take one small example, while using the Vision Pro, my phone kept buzzing with notifications; I simply took the phone out of my pocket, opened control center, and turned on do-not-disturb. What was remarkable only in retrospect is that I did all of that while technically being closed off to the world in virtual reality, but my experience was of simply glancing at the phone in my hand without even thinking about it. This is cool, but this still primarily requires AR-through-VR to be an experience that is in a tightly controlled environment, in part due to the technical constraints. On the extreme other end of AR offerings, you have the now-deprecated Google Glass. While Glass was not particularly successful, it led the pack in having an AR offering that you could truly take everywhere. And that, to me, is the huge value-add for a VR — it acts as “a bicycle for the mind”, a ubiquitous extension of our natural-born capabilities that we can use to accomplish whatever we want, faster. If we can nail the AR applications of this technology, I think it could be really as dominant and game changing as Meta needs it to be. But we’re a few big breakthroughs on battery tech and graphics away from that.
That said, though I think AR is an obvious win case for VR, none of the things that make me excited about VR as a technology really have much to do with AR at all. When I’m in a VR environment, I like being fully immersed. That’s actually a big part of the value add.
Besides gaming, can you guess when else I might enjoy complete and total immersion in what I’m doing?
I would love to see more VR applications focused on office work. I think it’s a natural fit — high end monitors already cost thousands of dollars, and software engineers in particular need high focus, low interruption spaces. Unfortunately, the economic reality of office spaces are such that we cannot justify a private office for every engineer. But maybe you don’t need one if your personal workspace can look like this.
The current limitations are still resolution and frame rate — we can’t get computer screens that can update fast enough at a high enough pixel density without creating something that requires too much energy or gives off too much heat to have glued to your face for that many hours. But again, the Apple Vision Pro might neatly solve these issues. And while the price tag for the Pro is quite high, I can imagine many big tech companies jumping to buy these for their engineers if it solves real estate space issues.
IV. Anyway, back to Meta.
It’s too early to determine whether or not this bet on VR will actually pay off, but I do think the way this has all been portrayed is unfair to Meta, and Mark in particular.
I think Zucc gets a lot of flack for taking a long term view and making strategic bets that seem wild to the public. But he gets to do these things because his board setup (namely: he is the board) effectively insulates him from being fired5, so he doesn’t have to care about public opinion at all. And honestly this has worked out for him. I think Mark has a good track betting track record, even when the market writ large told him he was being ridiculous — for example, acquisitions of WhatsApp and Insta, which were both seen has wildly over-priced when Meta bought them out. Remember, the “market” thought AWS was a bad idea too.
These days I just assume that most media sources have it out for Silicon Valley, and it seems like they especially hate Zucc. I think that could be a whole article in itself, but suffice to say: I don’t think Mark is wrong for betting on VR, I think it’s a fairly strategic approach to solving a thorny problem.
And maybe this makes me biased, but I also just hope it works out. I love VR gaming and experiences, and want to see more.
Though not for lack of trying! Back in 2016, Meta did push Free Basics in developing markets, which was somewhere between an OS and an application. Unfortunately for them, Free Basics was roundly condemned and eventually abandoned.
And remember, there were a ton of naysayers to smartphones too, people who were confident that existing computers would make smartphones obsolete before they even launched. Oops.
Half Life Alyx in particular stands out as an example of what the medium is capable of.
That’s not to say that I don’t have an online social life. I play a TON of video games online for example — Civ, obviously, but many others. But I don’t need VR for those activities. And if I’m just sitting around and talking, it’s not clear how much VR is adding on top. Even with the existence of video calling, I don’t get on video every single time (or even most of the time!) I want to call someone.
Unlike a certain other prolific tech founder, who recently found out the hard way what board control looks like.