The tech world has a long and ignoble history of utterly failing to predict the future. From IBM president Thomas Watson predicting a worldwide market of five computers in the 1940s, to Bill Gates claiming that 640k of memory should be enough for everyone, it turns out that tech leaders don’t necessarily have any more insight into the future of tech than the rest of us do.

The latest example designed to go down in infamy was Mark Zuckerberg, when renaming his company from Facebook to Meta:

Over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company, and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards.

Words that, in less than five years, have aged like spilt milk. Meta positioned itself as the leading company in the metaverse revolution, and has ended up as a bellwether of how that transformation is progressing. And the picture is not good. While its VR platform Rift is still very much alive, it’s losing features and hundreds of staff. The company has been trying to shut down Horizon Worlds, one of its key metaverse products – but has had to change its plans due to a backlash from users.

But, to be fair to the billionaire CEO, when he was writing, the metaverse did look like the future. We are just as guilty as him – at about the same time, I was writing a metaverse explainer for NEXT Insights:

However, the Metaverse is likely to be the next big wave in digital. Why? It encompasses and enables some of the working changes that are emerging post-pandemic, including hybrid working.

I’m so glad, in retrospect, that I wrote “is likely to be”, not “will be”. Because the metaverse was not the next big wave in digital; that honour goes to AI. So, why did so many of us get this wrong, from Zuckerberg, to me, to those executives who are even now massaging their LinkedIn bios to remove “metaverse” from their job titles five years ago? (Believe me, I sympathise — I had the job title “head of blogging” for some years in the 2000s…)

It was all the product of two moments in time happening at once…

Two moments in time that made the metaverse

Moment the first: the pandemic

Six years ago, at the time of writing, many countries were starting to go into lockdown. We were banned from meeting others, from socialising or going to offices. Our worlds suddenly, dramatically shrunk to a few hundred yards from our home. Suddenly, our social lives became mediated through the screen. We had cocktails via Zoom, played online games together, transferred much of our lives to a liminal digital space.

Venerable VR world Second Life started running out of digital space:

We are committed to maintaining (and improving) the stability and performance of Second Life. So while we are very gratified that we can be of help to people in these trying times, unfortunately, our current server systems cannot accommodate unlimited growth without adversely impacting that stability and performance. This means that region inventory in Second Life will be extremely limited and may not be readily available until early fall.

Surely, this was it, the moment that made the virtual world happen?

Friends, we know now that it wasn’t. What emerged from the pandemic was not a culture with a renewed commitment to digitised experiences. Instead, we learned what was better done by screen and what was so much more satisfying done in person. People understood that some workshops and collaborative work were worth trekking to the office for – and some routine meetings were just as well handled digitally.

And, outside work, the experience of being deprived of human contact made us all the more hungry for it, even if it was in different ways from before. The metaverse had its moment – but it passed.

Moment the second: what’s next?

At the same time as the pandemic hit, there was an anxious feeling across both the worlds of business and technology that the next wave of change must be coming. We’d had the internet, and the web, and the smartphone and the app economy, in under two decades. But, barring incremental changes on those, nothing truly transformative happened in the 2010s. It was a decade of exploration of the consequences of the changes of the previous decades.

So, as we entered the 2020s, people were hyper-alert for the next technological revolution. They, after all, did not want to repeat the mistake of the previous generations of business leaders: ignoring or dismissing the new technology until it was too late. No, they were going to be ready this time.

The problem? This hyper-vigilance led to at least two false dawns. We’re already explored what happened to blockchain, and the unfortunately and inaccurately named Web3, but the metaverse was very much the parallel of that.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems likely that the real “what’s next?” was AI. Time will tell if that’s truly the case, as we’re still deep in the hype cycle. But it’s clear that the metaverse was not the big tectonic shift in tech people were looking for.

Metaverse: the perpetual “nearly there” tech

The interesting thing about the bundle of technologies that we tend to lump under the “metaverse” name – largely augmented reality and virtual reality have been around, at least conceptually, for a long time now. Two decades ago, the business development office I worked in for one large publisher had two Second Life machines installed, which routed around the corporate firewall. Why did we need this? So our editorial teams could explore this new virtual environment, which was obviously going to be critical to the future of our titles.

Yeah, not so much.

But by 2013, NEXT had speakers on stage showing off their Google Glasses. And I was pondering the future of the platform. With over a decade’s distance, certain aspects of that piece make me wince. For example:

But it’s to another CEO of a once-market leading company that we should look for a hint of the future Glass represents. Step forward BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins:

“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore. Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”

Yes. That’s me quoting the CEO of Blackberry on the future of tech.

Down the glasshole

But as we know, Glasses were a short-lived product, disappearing into a niche of business use, before being shut down completely.

By 2017, we were starting to express some scepticism around this tech:

With any new technology there needs to be research – and it’s happening. But we can guess a few things. Under fives do not clearly distinguish between the real world and fiction. How would VR affect them? Until we know, let’s make use of the good things, and watch out for the bad.

Adrian Leu, CEO of Inition, was one of the few expressing scepticism about some aspects of the tech. But the general mood was still that this was coming, but there were a few technical hitches to deal with first. There is one quote in there, from David Wortley, then CEO of Gaetss, that seems eerily prescient:

Too many people are in university being trained to do jobs that won’t exist in 10 years. They need to focus on things that AIs and machines can’t do.

Perhaps his timescale was wrong — but not by much.

The unfulfilled potential of the metaverse

Nearly 10 years on, AI is very much here, but AR, VR and MxR (mixed reality — a term that has fallen out of favour) really aren’t.

But in the following years, this tech seemed tantalisingly close to reality. In 2019, our theme was Parallelwelten (Parallel Worlds):

Different parts of our world develop at very different speeds, in different directions, with different outcomes. Digital technology adds layer upon layer to our lives. Artificial intelligence creates a whole new world of possibilities and possible dangers. Augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR) or cross reality (XR) all show, by their names alone, that there is more than one reality. Reality becomes just another word for world (or universe).

And then, just two years later – and at the very next NEXT, as 2020’s edition was cancelled because… well, you know why – it was all Metaverse, all the time. We even added it as a category here on NEXT Insights. David Mattin kicked off with the needs that will drive people towards metaverses:

There will be multiple, overlapping meta verses. There won’t be one metaverse to rule them all. What fundamental human needs will your customers be questing after in these worlds? If you’re asking that question, you’re asking the right question.

What happened? Did we fail to build those needs into the product? Or was something deeper at work?

The hardware problem

13 years ago, Google Glass was a luxury consumer product, that most people couldn’t afford. Two years ago, the Apple Vision Pro was a luxury consumer product that most people couldn’t afford.

And here is the secret of the problem of the metaverse, and indeed many emerging technologies: you need both the hardware and the software to be ready. For autonomous vehicles, the delay is a combination of both. For virtual worlds and audited reality, the hardware is the issue. We are torn between great experiences – like the Apple Vision Pro – that are both expensive and heavy to wear. Or, at the other end of the scale, relatively cheap products that offer a significantly less compelling experience: think Snap’s Spectacles or Meta’s AI glasses.

These are both cool, interesting products. But they’re closer to toys than they are to essential devices. My nephew got some Meta glasses for Christmas — but my brother and his wife didn’t buy themselves a pair. That’s the barrier that this technology needs to cross.

One day, our metaverse will come

I’m convinced that virtual worlds will matter. They won’t be a dominant disruptive tech. But they will be part of the infrastructure of our digital experiences. And, for many, they already are. The virtual worlds being used daily today are mostly all one thing: games.

From Roblox to Fortnite to World of Warcraft, people globally, both children and adults, are still logging on daily to escape into virtual worlds, in a way that’s satisfying, affordable, and supported by today’s technology. Even Microsoft’s backing off from the complete closure of Horizon Worlds, which never had the reach of any of those games, shows that there’s a strong and vocal niche market of people who aren’t willing to let their worlds just disappear. Microsoft was only ever shutting off the VR aspect of it – they planned to continue support on mobile and the web. But those who use Quest hardware were upset to see that immersive experience under threat. For some, VR is already here. But it’s only a niche. And there’s another niche enjoying Formula 1 racing on Vision Pro.

The trick is finding the right hardware to bring it to the mainstream.

The potential is there. Largely, the software is, too. It’s the hardware that’s lacking. But we’ll get there. After all, we had two decades of mobile phones before the smartphone propelled them into global ubiquity. The devices that will make AR and then VR more mainstream will come. But predicting hardware timescales is a tough, tough thing to do.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash