In mundane reality, I am standing in my living room, trying not to bash my shins on the coffee table, with a £320 lump of plastic strapped to my head. Conceptually, though, I am in the metaverse—a virtual reality (VR) concept that, for much of the past decade, big tech promised us was the future.
In March this year it was announced that Horizon Worlds, Meta’s flagship metaverse venture, would shut down its VR operations in June, continuing only as a mobile app. The announcement was quickly reversed, after a fashion, as Meta promised not to pull the plug on a service users had bought expensive headsets to access. Instead of a quick end, Horizon Worlds would die slowly—no longer maintained or updated, but still accessible to those who had already signed up.
That’s why I’m standing with a Meta Quest headset strapped to my head on 15th June. Are people going to mark the moment they staved off a virtual reality apocalypse? Is this the celebration scene at the end of the movie, when disaster is averted? Will the metaverse be full of cheering crowds?
The short answer was no: Meta has built a whole network of virtual reality worlds, almost all of them empty. The concept was glitzy: Meta itself would build a hub, which let you design and build your own VR avatar—initially, to much derision, without legs, although these were later added.
Users could then build their own themed worlds which anyone could explore, playing games, buying and selling virtual merchandise and chatting with other visitors. Meta promised it would host gigs, comedy clubs and more. Big brands—including Wendy’s, Mini, Cheetos, Fender and the NBA—were lured to build sponsored worlds. It would be a whole new way to experience the internet.
The busiest venue I can find in Horizon Worlds is Metdonald’s, a VR “parody” of the fast-food chain, with 29 people inside. I am teleported to a crude carpark with a decent facsimile of a McDonald’s restaurant inside it. The design encourages me to go through a drive thru.
When I get to the front, I hear the disembodied voices of American children trying to get a non-functional ordering screen to do something. “Five thousand hamburgers please,” one kid says repeatedly, before getting frustrated at another player standing on top of their car.
Another child tries to challenge me to play one of the games nearby, and is quickly annoyed when I can’t work out the controls well enough to do so. Meta spent tens of billions of dollars on building the future of the internet, and all it has to show for it is a handful of bored children in the parking lot of an offbrand drive-thru restaurant. Something clearly went very wrong here, but it’s not immediately clear what—or what that means for big tech’s ability to shape the future when it’s not what the rest of us want.
by James Ball, Prospect | Read more:
Image: Benny Douet
