Can The Metaverse Be Saved?
Meta shifts focus away from the metaverse as virtual realities struggle to retain users and artificial intelligence progresses.
Photo Source: The Gamer
If you’ve been starting to question the success of the metaverse, you’re not alone.
The metaverse has been raved about, yet a work in progress, for about a year. While it's still early days, it’s already failed to meet the expectations of many companies, notably Meta.
In 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta and poured an abundant amount of money and time into developing the virtual reality Horizon Worlds. However, following a series of legless avatars, floating torsos and non-returning visitors, the metaverse was proving to be a fad. According to Insider, the Reality Labs division, which builds the metaverse, lost $13.7 billion in 2022.
Now, Meta has reportedly stopped pitching the idea of a metaverse to advertisers. Instead, the company’s focus has shifted toward the development of short-form video Reels and artificial intelligence tools. It’s no secret that AI has been the largest advancement in recent months, but what does this mean for everything that went into building the metaverse?
Well, the metaverse is not halting development, it’s just not being presented to advertisers. In the meantime, Meta needs to fix the issues that set the metaverse back in 2022 and find a new source of engagement - perhaps interoperability? On a lighter note, you’ll be happy to hear that avatars in Horizon Worlds now have legs!
Although glitches and errors are in repair, there’s a lot of speculation that the metaverse cannot be saved and needs to be recreated, which may include shifting focus from Horizon Worlds back to the Meta Quest Pro.
“Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a letter to staff, according to CNN. With successful new AI tools launched by competing companies, such as Microsoft’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, meta has a lot to catch up on.
Zuckerberg also hints that the shift may work in favor toward reaching their metaverse goals, as he made comments about AI being able to help discover new content and help engineers write better code faster.
Aside from Meta, the metaverse has yet to be an overwhelming success. In October 2022, we published an article discussing the progress of different metaverse worlds. This includes their visitor reach compared to expectations, as well as the complications that set each of the worlds back in retaining users. Since then, we’ve only seen brief progress in March and don’t expect solutions to be made by the end of 2023.
Taking in all this information, we’ve decided to pause metaverse coverage until we see some real advancements in this category. At Don’t Count Us Out Yet, we aim to share new innovations that we believe are succeeding and important for you to know.
Best,
Ariana for the Don’t Count Us Out Yet Team