2023-07-16 08:12:36
Omnipresent in 2021, the metaverse today seems to absent subscribers. We don’t hear regarding it anymore. If Facebook hadn’t renamed itself Meta, we would almost have forgotten regarding it. An absence that shows that this announced revolution is already ancient history? Not quite.
The essential : For Vishal Shah, Meta vice president of metaverse, digital worlds are not dead, but the hype that surrounded them is. And he is happy with this situation.
According to him, the hype that also surrounded the metaverse has evaporated – and with it a good part of the value of Meta. Only people who seriously believe in this technology and who have invested independently in the craze for the subject persist. “We have not invested [dans le métavers] for the hype, we have been investing in this space for years,” he added during Fortune Brainstorm Tech Conferenceincluding the acquisition of Oculus in 2014, he recalled.
Is there anyone still on board?
If the vice-president of Meta in charge of the metaverse sees the situation in a good light, we are entitled to ask ourselves questions concerning the future of digital worlds. The fact is, many have turned away from the market over the past year.
Disney has indeed abandoned its metaverse ambitions, while Microsoft has drawn a line under its own adventure in the metaverse and on a virtual reality social platform that it acquired in 2017. Since the hype for the metaverse, we moved on to the “meh-taverse”, as so aptly called le Wall Street Journal.
So of course, several factors played in this collapse of the metaverse :
The war in Ukraine has reshuffled the cards of attention, but above all had large-scale repercussions. From general inflation to the energy crisis, passing through macroeconomic uncertainties, even the giants of the technology industry have revised their ambitions downwards to avoid damage. In difficulty in 2022, many of them have been made redundant and expensive and uncertain projects have been shelved.
But today, the situation seems to be getting better, so why don’t they try the adventure once more? On the one hand, economic concerns are still relevant, even if the technological giants have seen their value explode since the beginning of 2023, on the other, a new technology takes center stage: generative artificial intelligence. has indeed totally taken precedence over the metaverse. The fact is that it is much more concrete for the general public, as well as its applications.
Is the metaverse dead?
Vishal Shah says no.
“I’m actually quite happy that there was both excitement and disappointment last year, it was difficult to live with, of course, for us too,” he said. “But now we focus and build, because that’s what it takes to build something that’s hard to iterate. »
Meta has therefore not completely abandoned the metaverse, despite the significant reductions made last year in its branch dedicated to its development and, above all, its undisguised enthusiasm for AI.
Is Mark Zuckerberg’s company right to still believe in it?
The fact is that, from the start, we knew that the digital world would take time to develop, but also to enter into mores. So it’s no surprise that interest in the field falters, especially when another technology takes over the scene. Moreover, even if Meta seems to have lowered its ambitions, the company has assured it on several occasions, it has not abandoned the metaverse for all that. It has also recently presented a new reality headset virtual and mixed, the Quest 3 which will be released this fall. For many, the arrival of Apple in the sector with the Vision Pro might also put the spotlight back on the metaverse.
In conclusion : as Vishal Shah explained, the metaverse will not appear overnight. It is a technology and an experience that requires time. “I don’t think it’s like a switch, where overnight you suddenly feel like you’re in the metaverse, whereas the day before you weren’t. I think it will be done iteratively over many years. »
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