At the 2021 Facebook Connect event, Mark Zuckerberg shared his vision of the future that included “the evolution of the mobile Internet” in the form of the “Metaverse”. This is a collective virtual space in which people are able to play games, work and interact with others, oftentimes by using virtual reality (VR). The users wield a photorealistic avatar, a digital persona, which can be linked to their identity (Brodsky, 2022). With this, a long-standing dream of Mr. Zuckerberg may become a reality; at Facebook’s launch, he hoped that one day a Facebook account could be used as a digital passport. A key question at the time was what the Metaverse will mean for privacy. Especially since the company was under fire for scandals it was embroiled in and for leaking sensitive documents. Now, a year after Facebook changed its name to “Meta”, there is considerable persistent skepticism (Mac et al., 2022). Increasingly, Google and Apple operating systems are cutting off access to users’ personal data. Through the Metaverse, Facebook attempts to collect personal data in its own environment. These include facial expressions and moods that can be read through VR glasses. In addition, reality lab cameras are also incorporated into the VR glasses to scan users’ surroundings. Using this, Mr. Zuckerberg wants to ensure that everyone is filmed at every moment and, most importantly, they feel safe doing so. All this to prevent his “fairy tale internet” from being dismissed as a privacy nightmare (Feld, 2022).
There is also skepticism among the employees themselves, stating that “if we don’t love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time, how can we expect our users to love it?” In response to this, Mr. Zuckerberg came out with a clear message that you either get on board or get out. Since then, meetings have again been conducted in the Metaverse’s provisional app, Horizon Workrooms, but because the team was thwarted by technical glitches they ended up using Zoom (Mac et al., 2022). It is clear that much remains to be done if the Metaverse wants to take its prominent place as a communication tool in the future. Major systematic errors should be taken out, real-time data synchronization should be optimized, VR technologies should become cheaper, and many difficulties for the metaverse’s designers should be fixed. If that is all fixed, the question remains whether there is a demand for it.. as yet we are still at the “throw money at a wall and see what sticks” stage (Thornhill, 2022).
References
Brodsky, S. (6 October 2022). The Metaverse Probably Won’t Be All That We’ve Been Promised, Lifewire. [Online]. Retrieved from https://www.lifewire.com/the-metaverse-probably-wont-be-all-that-weve-been-promised-experts-say-6747794
Feld, H. (7 October 2022). Why The Future Of The Metaverse May Lie In The FCC’s Hands, Forbes. [Online]. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/10/07/why-the-future-of-the-metaverse-may-lie-in-the-fccs-hands/?sh=4dfb8ae12b6e
Mac, R., Frenkel S., Roose, K. (9 October, 2022). Skepticism, Confusion, Frustration: Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Struggles. The New York Times [Online]. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/technology/meta-zuckerberg-metaverse.html
Thornhill, J. (13 October, 2022). The metaverse revolution may yet devour Meta, Financial Times. [Online]. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/d39db54e-e1a6-4938-9b5c-b0bd41a41907
Hey Joris, this a very informative article. Though it’s hard to believe Mr. Zuckerberg would throw money down the drain, I am convinced he must have an idea to market this. Besides, the concept is not new, and it seems like we are slowly being primed for this from movies like ‘ready player one’ to other dramatic storylines in series like ‘Black Mirror’. Now, I don’t think he is behind the creative ideas of Netflix but we are slowly shown possibly ideas for our future in Meta and I think many people are curious to experience this for themselves, myself included.
The metaverse project seems to be at the beginning of the end and Zuckerberg is suffering from achoring bias. He refuses to admit that this technology and society are not yet ripe for this. I would love to see the meta verse succeed but I fear that what he is doing now is just giving the idea of a meta verse a bad reputation and delaying its future adoption. Also, it’s true that Meta does not have the best reputation when it comes to usage of private data, and having a entire life + social interaction potentially be saved in a cloud is worring. Both for privacy and security reasons.
It’s an interesting innovation that we will have to keep an eye out if we want it to create the highest value to society.