In which I make a bold claim that may prove to age rather poorly
A lot of people have been enjoying clowning on Mark Zuckerberg and Meta Metaverse lately. As a Millennial who has just opened himself up to ridicule be using Gen-Z slang, I too am sorely tempted to jump on the bandwagon and criticise the floating, severed torsos; the graphics that would make Animal Crossing fans throw their Nintendo Switch in the bin; the bulky, expensive headsets and Nintendo Power Glove controllers; and the way that Mark Zuckerberg really leans in to being perceived as an emotionless robot. The truth is, however, that I am conflicted.
I am conflicted because I can't help but think back to a mistake I made fifteen years ago this very night; a mistake concerning the prospects of a company that is now the second most-visited site on the entire internet, generating ~$30billion in revenue. It was a mistake that led me to mouth-off about how nothing is going to come of this website; that the site is economically infeasible; and that nobody in their right mind would ever want to watch anything on a screen that small. I was talking about YouTube.
The First Year of YouTube
In early 2006, YouTube was haemorrhaging a million dollars a day on bandwidth and serving low-quality, low-resolution videos, that took ages to load even for someone like me who had the most advanced home internet connection available (twin ISDN, anyone?).
To me, the idea that YouTube would have mass appeal was ludicrous, because it just wasn't good.
At the time, I thought this was a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw from the evidence provided. Obviously, I was majorly wrong, and that was because I was making a mistake called static thought.
Static Thought
Static thought is a term used in Developmental Psychology to describe a child's belief that the world is unchanging. They believe that how things are in the present is how they always have been and how they always will be. Please note, that when I made my terrible YouTube prediction, I was not, in fact, a child, but rather a 21 year-old adult with only a few months left on my degree (with Honours) in Computer Science, from a university ranked in the global top 50. So I should have known better.
Specifically, when it came to YouTube, I was guilty of thinking that the level of technology that we had in 2006 would never improve, even though a cursory glance at the recent past would show such an idea to be completely wrong.
I believed that the video resolution would always be low, failing to predict HD and 4K video formats. I believed the videos would always take ages to load, unable to foresee the massive increase in internet speeds that were just over the horizon. I thought the general quality of the produced videos would always be terrible, unable to understand that not only would cameras get better, cheaper, and more accessible, but also the people making the videos learn, adapt, and grow, and improve the quality of their content as well. Most laughable of all, I actually thought that the size of the video player would always be tiny, and that would be a huge problem. Yes, I even thought they would never be able to go full screen.
I was dead wrong.
The Metaverse is Actually Within Reach
Fundamentally, the reason it is so easy to make fun of the Metaverse is that the reality is so monumentally far from what we've been promised.
When Mark Zuckerberg revealed Meta's vision for the Metaverse in the autumn of 2021, we were presented with hyper-realistic graphics, as good as any CGI render, with the real-world Mark Zuckerberg walking around this environment. Although he does mention putting on glasses or a headset, Mark enters the Metaverse without these. He shows us a girl in a park playing table tennis with a remote opponent, in real-time (and she isn't wearing a headset, either).
This impressive, superlative, perfect vision is what we are led to believe the Metaverse is, but what's actually been delivered is a mega-bucket of disappointment. The graphics suck, everyone has half their body missing, even the promotional material seems to take place in an empty nothing-space, inhabited only by Mark, the Friendly Ghost. It's like those hastily-thrown-together, obvious-scam, crappy phone games that are not anything close to the advert of screenshots on the Play Store. The quality is just so degraded, it's absurd. We've been promised the holodeck from Star Trek, and they've delivered some sort of paper doll puppet theatre.
But to write the Metaverse off at this time, and to believe that how the Metaverse is now is how it will be ten years from now is to make the same Static Thought mistake that I made with YouTube fifteen years ago.
If we look at the development of computer graphics, internet speeds, technological miniaturisation, and the emergence of digital holograms in the entertainment industry, then we can clearly see that every element required to make the Metaverse vision a reality has a very good chance of actually happening.
Computer graphics on games consoles are approaching the point of being indistinguishable from reality. 5G mobile internet can already deliver up to 1000Mbps, with the potential to reach as high as 4Gbps in the future, with 6G mobile internet already in development. Miniaturisation has led to commercially available processors with 64 cores, computers the size of a phone, and phones with multiple tiny cameras of a better quality than the last actual camera you bought, priced at the budget end of the market.
Holography seems the most out of reach, but just consider the great strides taken between Tupac's 2012 Coachella appearance and ABBA's 2022 Voyage tour. The advancement with the Tupac hologram was that it really did look like he was on stage, even if it was still clear he was a hologram because he was shining like a lighthouse on an otherwise poorly-lit stage. The ABBA digital ABBAtars look like actual human beings, with minor lighting problems creating an uncanny effect from time to time. The challenge for Meta is to make these digital holograms render at such a high quality in real-time, something which all the other technological elements mentioned above will have a hand in.
It could still be rubbish, though
I'm not saying that the Metaverse will happen and that it will be a great success. Meta could decide to move in another direction, and just cancel the Metaverse project, just like they did with their virtual assistant, M. They could double-down on the graphics and make the cartoon-ish style a decision rather than a technical limitation. Or they could ruin it in some other, unforeseen way, just like how Facebook ruined Facebook by turning it from a place where university students organise their social lives to a place where conspiracy theorists organise insurrections. The Metaverse could just turn out to be something that few people actually want to spend time on, like Second Life or Habbo.
The point is that all of these jokes about the graphics, the quality, the headsets, and how objectively terrible it is is a static thought, equivalent to how the Toyota Prius was literally the punchline to a joke about electric cars 20 years ago, and now electric cars have become the ultimate middle-class status symbol.
We should step away from our static thoughts and consider that the Metaverse vision actually has a good chance of being the reality ten-fifteen years from now. If I'm wrong, you should let me know then, because right now the Metaverse is a Smosh video filmed on a webcam in 2006, loading on a dial-up modem, and just as it was a mistake to judge YouTube based on that, then, it is a mistake to judge the metaverse based on how it is now.
Read Next:
>> That Time a Usability Test Made me Want the Earth to Open up and Swallow me Whole
>> Self-Driving Cars can't Solve the Trolley Problem, Neither can You, and That's OK
>> The Functional, Usable, Delightful of... Park Benches
Top comments (0)