Context
Meta Connect is the yearly event that reminds the tech community that the metaverse is still a relevant and fun topic to debate.
The stakes are high for the metaverse mission. On one hand, believers believe that it will be the ‘next big thing’, the next technology to transform the ways individual people compute, engage, and reside. It’s a science fiction dream that could have a larger effect on society than the iPhone.
On the other hand, it’s a projected $70B investment that could lead to the collapse of one of history’s most polarizing companies.
Metaverse Headwinds
There are three adversaries to the metaverse conquest mission.
Product Use Cases
Cultural Behavior
Financial Investment
In this article, we’ll focus on the product use case. Because this is the major obstacle for any product to reach product-market fit - it needs to provide un-arguable value to the end user.
After this event, there has been a focus on whether VR is better suited for social use cases (e.g. games, social hang outs) versus enterprise use cases (e.g. meetings). Many reference the rise of the PC, which started as a corporate tool before gaining mainstream consumer popularity, as an argument for why VR should position itself as a workplace product before going for general consumer adoption.
On the flip side, most of the existing (non-trivial) product engagement is for entertainment and gaming. Clearly there is a divide between the existing value proposition that the Quest provides with the one Zuckerberg and analysts are dreaming of.
Overarching Trends
It’s hard to separate Metaverse discourse today from two overarching trends that have been accelerated by the pandemic. It’s crucial to call them out because of their impact on the future of VR.
Distributed Work
The first is the trend of distributed work. Knowledge workers are no longer fixed to the location of their office, but instead have incredible optionality in where they want to reside. While the impact of this trend is most obvious on work, its social implications are perhaps less apparent. Not only is work remote, but social lives too have been disrupted by this trend. Whereas before, a group of friends may be living in the same city because they had similar jobs in nearby offices, now they may be separated for their own personal reasons. The benefits of these decisions can’t be overstated. Remote life offers incredible convenience for families and digital nomads, and also saves companies on office expenses and reduces transportation throughput which positively affects the climate.
In practice, distributed work leads to distributed social graphs. People of like jobs, interests, birthplace may now live very far from each other. Their physical spaces are miles apart but virtual spaces don’t have to be. Because of this physical distance, we’ve seen the second post-pandemic trend emerge.
Asynchronous Communication
As a result of distributed living and working, there is a trend to asynchronous communication. The reasons are convenience. It’s more flexible for varied schedules, it’s inclusive to people who are physically separated, and it’s often more efficient for collaboration.
In fact, we don’t just see this play out in work, but also in lots of day to day social and entertainment experiences.
Live tv → Netflix
Radio → Podcasts
Live streams → Youtube / Tik Tok
Phone calls → Group chat.
In work, we see more and more meetings going async, with a plethora of tools being used to service this new enterprise demand and to capitalize on the same benefits.
However, the tradeoff with this trend towards asynchronous communication is that it’s suboptimal for relationship building. It reduces empathy, since being present with another person is very important towards building strong relationships. And it reduces the amount of shared human experiences which are crucial to forming critical memories.
With current tools, remote team culture can’t live up to an in-office culture and building strong bonds with friends by sharing Tik Toks cannot match the experience of going to a concert together.
The Dimensions of VR Success
Through this lens, the debate over the use case of virtual reality become less about whether it is a better fit for social or enterprise. Instead, the bet on VR is a a bet on synchronous experiences.
The trends toward distributed living and asynchronous communication has put a strain on synchronous experiences. This is the problem that VR and the metaverse should hope to solve. If the trends continue, and there’s good reason for it to continue, then the strain will exacerbate. In this world, VR use cases will necessarily span social and enterprise. They will apply to anyone who wants to balance the tradeoff between cultivating strong relationships with the convenience and priorities that come from living remotely.
Instead of a group of friends talking about a football game over group chat, they’ll watch the game together in a shared lounge from the comfort of their homes. Parents and children will replace Facetime calls with board games nights across a shared virtual table. Company happy hours can escape the dreadful awkwardness of Zoom and instead mimic the elements of real social bonding.
Will these experiences match their in-person counterparts? Definitely not. But it doesn’t have to fully replace the things we love today to provide critical value. The innovation of VR is that it will help solve the tradeoffs of remote life by providing better synchronous experiences for those that are physically separated. If this comes to fruition, it’s unlikely that VR will replace the PC. Instead, it’s more likely that our phones, tablets and computers will remain our go-to tool for async tasks, whereas our VR headset will be the tool for synchronous tasks.
It’s a big bet on these trends continuing post-pandemic, but one that will monumentally shift the way people work and socialize.