October, 2022
Was speaking to an engineer at Meta’s Reality Labs and asked him if he actually believes that VR can be the next platform evolution and if so, can Facebook own that platform?
He says that VR has interesting use cases in gaming and professional work. While I agree on VR’s use in gaming, it’s hard to see its applicability in everyday white collar work.
The example he gave is, two employees working from home and collaborating on code, where instead of using video, screen share and in-app collaboration, their avatars are in the metaverse and collaborating there.
For this to actually gain PMF, we need to believe that there are big problems with current WFH processes and tools (which is true) and for which the best solution is this version 1 of VR that the engineer points out to. I don’t buy the latter.
If engineers at Reality Labs can barely point to only one use case outside gaming which itself is not very believable, then is the medium term TAM of VR contained within gaming? In that case, it’s not fathomable that VR is the next platform evolution, let alone Meta owning it.
This same engineer now tells me that ‘metaverse for conference rooms’ product has now been nuked. They probably too realised that this is a very sexy product that solves no current problem.