VR, the Metaverse, and Barriers to Entry

media platform, as well as Instagram, WhatsApp, etcetera. As to why Zuckerberg and company wanted to change the name, there are a lot of possible reasons. Some of them range to the cynical, such as, you know, the name Facebook has a sort of stigma attached to it and the company would really like to distance itself from that, to the practical. You know, Facebook is just one of many products that this company offers. So it is kind the confusing if you if you called the company the same

name as just one of the things it offers. All the way to the aspirational that Meta is a reference to the apparently unavoidable approach of the metaverse that we cannot escape if we wanted to. Now, the metaverse as a concept is, I would argue, still pretty wibbly wobbly timey. Whymy as the doctor would say, there's kind of a general idea about what it will be, you know, some

sort of persistent, online, interactive and immersive environment. On the more modest side, this could potentially just be the next big evolutionary step and online social networks. On the more grandiose side, the metaverse could be the new way we interact online with everything. I mean, it wouldn't just be how we socialize or entertain ourselves. It might dominate how we interact at work. You know, we might attend virtual

meetings in a virtual eating room. It could dominate how we shop as we peruse virtual aisles, and it would be essentially everything. It would be the virtual equivalent of the real world around us. Now, if you extend that vision to dystopic proportions, you get something like Ready Player one by Ernest Klein or snow Crash by Neil Stevenson,

and for the record, I personally prefer snow Crash now. Many, though not all, conceptualizations of the metaverse incorporate virtual reality or VR in an intrinsic way, So this concept has users dawning virtual reality gear so that they can really immerse themselves into this persistent virtual world. So I thought I would chat a little bit about some of the challenges that have accompanied virtual reality, because I think it's good to acknowledge the hurdles before you rush headlong into

an uncertain future. If you don't acknowledge the challenges that are in the way, then it's just gonna make it more difficult to address those challenges when the time comes. So I want to really do that in this episode and talk about the things I see as being barriers to entrgue for the metaverse in the future. Now, by the time the metaverse is actually a thing, which will probably be maybe a decade from now, it's quite possible

that all of these issues will have been solved. But without talking about them, it's hard to, you know, come up with solutions. So first of all, let's define some terms. What is virtual reality? Well, unlike the metaverse, this is something that we can more easily define. We typically credit Jarren Lanier with coining the phrase virtual reality. Lanier has done incredible work in computer science and in virtual environments, but the fact is there were earlier concepts similar to

what we call virtual reality. Some of them had names like artificial reality. Anyway, the basic idea when you boil it down, is that you're using to tchnology to surround a user with a computer generated environment or a computer generated reality. So it should be immersive and it should also be interactive, because if the environment is not interactive, it feels like you're standing in a still photograph of the environment. You wouldn't be able to do anything, and

your sense of immersion would very quickly kind of crumble. Uh. Like, the most you might be able to do in such a primitive implementation is to change your point of view by moving your head around. But otherwise your options would be really limited. So for it to be a real virtual reality experience, you need to have some sort of agency within the environment, some way to interact with the

computer generated environment that's around you. Now, virtual reality is a subset of a technology we call mixed reality, and this is a term that would come a little bit later, but it was really meant to help contextualize the spectrum between virtual reality and augmented reality. Okay, so in an ideal virtual reality implementation, we're talking something like the holidayck

in Star Trek. Everything that the user's senses would be provided by the computer, so that would include not just whatever the user is seeing and hearing, but also what they can touch and smell and maybe even taste as well. But ultimately, all the stuff that the user is experiencing wouldn't be quote unquote real. They would be computer generated.

It would be a simulation of the real. Augmented reality or a R, on the other hand, uses a computer to enhance or augment your experience in the real world. It's a overlay of digital technology on top of what you're really experiencing. So a common example is imagine you've got a pair of glasses that let you see the world around you. So it's at transparent lenses you can look around and see everything, but those lenses can also overlay digital information within your view of the world around you.

So maybe you're using the glasses to display turn by turn directions as you make your way to a destination. So you could see the directions, but you can also see through the directions to the real world and beyond and that, you know, it's kind of like heads up displays and military aircraft. They've had these for for many years now. That's an example of augmented reality, and like virtual reality, augmented reality doesn't just have to be tied

to vision. More often than not, that's how we see these implementations, but it doesn't have to be vision based at all. It could include sound, It could include other sensations as well, like tactile feedback or what we call haptic feedback. The important bit is that a computer is generating the things that you are sensing in order to give you more information or enhance your experience within or real world environment, not to replace it, but to enhance it.

So a great augmented reality implementation shouldn't distract you from what's actually going on around you, which is easier said than done, because often we like to put cool stuff in our tech, and that cool stuff might ultimately prove to be a distraction from the real world, which is kind of defeating the purpose of augmented reality. But back to virtual reality now, in the eighties and nineties, which

I'm sure some of you remember. Some of you listeners out there are probably around my age or maybe even older, and you might remember what virtual reality was like when it was debuting in the late eighties and into the early two mid nineties of the technology that could bring virtual reality out of the hypothetical concept phase and into a primitive but working model was really taking shape, and

it required a ton of work. I do not want to be dismissive of the incredible technological innovation that was required to make virtual reality possible when you start thinking about all the different elements that have to come into play. That you have to have various types of accelerometers and sensors to be able to tell when someone is turning their head to what degree, at what speed, you know, and be able to reflect that in the view that's get sent to the user. Like that alone blows my mind.

It is a not an easy thing to solve, at least not initially, and it required so much work. Head malone displays needed to be able to really track a person's head movements accurately and with as little latency as possible. Latency is delay. If you've ever played a bad video game where you push a button and there's a delay before anything happens, you know how latency can be frustrating.

There's there's kind of a similar issue. It's not we wouldn't call it latency, but occasionally you might watch a video where the audio is out of sync with the video, where you might see someone moving their mouth but there's no voice coming out, and then a couple of seconds later you hear the voice. That is incredibly frustrating experience to to try and watch a video where this problem has arisen. Imagine that, but it's with a first person experience.

You're having imagined that the world around you is having this weird delay. So with virtual reality, and you know generally just mixed reality, latency can really spell disaster, or could at least spell the need for a clean up on Aisle three, because if there's a delay between when you turn your head and when the environment you're looking at matches that motion. In other words, when you're your

perspective matches what you're physically doing. If there's a delay between those things, you get this unpleasant swimming sensation that often can lead to motion sickness. Other aspects of the R can also provoke emotion sickness response, and we're gonna talk about that a little bit more later in this episode it but yeah, that's one of the big things that early VR researchers were trying to minimize is that latency. So in the early days of R things were really primitive.

The equipment was incredibly expensive. Most of the time, you're talking about stuff that's custom made for a research project. You could try to pull things off the shelf and incorporate them into your designs, but it's just that no one was making these things like head mounted displays as a commercial product, so you had to do it all yourself. You know, you might cobble it together with existing stuff to make it happen, but still was a lot of labor.

The equipment was really bulky, the resolutions were really low, so you were talking about very simple graphics because you just couldn't pull off anything complex. And lots of folks who are working in the field really we're focusing on specific applications that would converge into the technology of virtual reality. But there was so much to be done right, Like it's it's the sort of thing where you couldn't have one person pioneer everything. You had to have lots of

different specialists to kind of get all the pieces to fit. Unfortunately, while this was taking shape and as amazing as it was, it just wasn't ready for prime time. But the more hype minded folks would step in and they kind of messed everything up. See, early virtual reality worked in a manner of fashion, but it wasn't sophisticated, and you know, if you were looking at it as a form of entertainment, it wasn't necessarily satisfying. Head Meldon displays we're really heavy.

I mean we're talking about before flat panel displays really became a thing. So you were wearing effectively a small monitor on your face that was too heavy for a person to wear comfortably for any length of time. So a lot of early VR systems used displays that were in turn suspended from a rig that was you know,

mounted on the ceiling. You know, you would have this grid where you would have cables come down and support at least some of the weight of the headset so that a person could wear it without you know, crumpling to the ground. But that also limited the user's movement, right, they couldn't walk around with these things because they were tethered two. Uh, these rigs that helped support the weight.

That obviously limits the VR experience somewhat. Doesn't mean that the technology wasn't incredible, just means that maybe it wasn't the right thing to spring on the public. Now, on top of all that, compute power and graphics processing were nowhere close to where they are today. So rendering graphics takes a lot of juice, it takes a lot of processing power, and so early VR implementations were incredibly primitive

compared to the video games of today. In fact, they were primitive compared to the video games of the time. Like if you were to play a best of class computer game at the same time as the experience a VR game like Dactyl Nightmare, you would say, Wow, these graphics are terrible compared to what I can play at home, And the stuff that you can play at home back at that time doesn't even come close to measuring up

with what we can achieve today. So it would take a lot of time to develop software and hardware approaches that could create a high resolution experience. Now I mentioned Dactyl Nightmare just now. When we come back, I'm going to talk a little bit more about it, because I feel that that experience really kind of illustrates the limitations of virtual reality during its first phase and help explain why VR ended up having a long period where no

one was really talking about it. But first, let's take this quick break. Okay, let's talk about Dactyl Nightmare. Now. This was a VR experience that debuted in nine and it's a great example of a simple, early and primitive VR game. Now, the way I experienced this was that there was a shopping mall about half an hour away from where I lived at the time as a kid teenager, where you would go and there was this one storefront

that had been turned into a VR arcade. I think they had maybe four pedestals where you would get up on the pedestal, there'd be a ring that would close around you, so it would limit your movement that way, you wouldn't walk off the pedestal and trip and fall and break your leg and sue the store or whatever. You had those ginormous headsets that were partially suspended from the ceiling to help take off some of the weight, and you played a couple of different games, the main

one being Dactyl Nightmare. Um. The virtual world in Dactyl Nightmare consists of just five platforms in an otherwise featureless void, so it's just darkness all around you. In these five platforms. You have one platform at the center and the other four platforms are bordering the center one, So there's one on each side, and they're slightly higher up than the center platform, and there's a staircase leading from each of

the bordering platforms down to the center. And it was the first person shooting game, at least usually that's the way it was. There were a couple of other modes in it, but as the first person shooting game, and players were represented as crude polygonal people by people things, and occasionally another crude, ligtal flying creature, the so called dactyl Tera. Dactyl would swoop in and grab a player

and fly off with him and then drop them. If you do an image search for Dactyl Nightmare you'll see what I'm talking about. And again, I don't want to dismiss these early attempts at virtual reality. So to achieve something like Dactyl Nightmare took a ton of work. Uh. I think the mistake was trying to bring VR in its state in the yearly nineties to market a little too soon, because people who experienced games like Dactyl Nightmare

had varying reactions. I mean, there were some folks who did it and they saw the promise of v R and they said, well, This is a really cool idea, and I can't wait to see what it looks like when the tech has matured right Like they're saying, this is clearly not where it needs to be right now, but I can't wait to see where it evolves. There were a lot of other people, I think the vast majority who their reaction kind of boiled down to this is awful. I can't believe people were making such a

big deal out of this. This is just a fad now. In previous episodes of Tech Stuff, I've talked about the Gartner hype cycle. The company Gartner created a sort of a graphical representation of the process that an emerging technology tends to go through with regard to height. So this doesn't necessarily relate directly to the capabilities of the technology as much as how we perceive and treat the tech, how much our expectations can often exceed whatever the tech

is really capable of doing. So early on in an emerging technologies life cycle or hype cycle, the interest in the technology skyrockets. That's what we saw with VR in

the early nineties. People start blue skying how the tech is going to change everything, And in fact, I would argue we were in that phase with the metaverse last year, or you know, late last year, maybe early this year, and some companies still I think, are But I think a lot of other people feel they've already past the heak of hype and are on the downward slope at this point. Some of us, anyway, I know, I am now generally in this cycle. You have what is called

the peak of inflated expectations. This is the highest point of hype, where your belief in the tech is well beyond what the tech can deliver. We saw this with autonomous car technology. I was definitely guilty of this, where I was convinced that we were maybe a year or two away from autonomous cars revolutionizing the way we get around and and virtually eliminating things like vehicular accidents and deaths. That was sadly, wildly too optimistic. It was incredibly naive,

and I fully own up to that. So, as the name suggests, the peak of inflated expectations, we sort of have this realization that the tech that we were so hyped for can't possibly live up to the hype that we've bought into, maybe even hype that we ourselves have generated. So our excitement for the technology then come is crashing down, it bottoms out and what Gardner refers to as the

trough of disillusionment. But then once we hit rock bottom, once we've you know, kind of woken up to the fact that we placed ridiculous expectations on this technology, we can then better evaluate what the tech actually can and can't do, and maybe we start to get a little excited again. Now we're not going to go as crazy as we were in the beginning, but we might get a little more optimistic. And this is the slope of enlightenment.

And then we hit the plateau of productivity. This is where our expectations for the tech and the actual capabilities of the tech finally level out and we can actually be productive with the technology. We're no longer you know, throwing out hyperbole about what the technology is going to be capable of doing. Uh. And I think we're a ways away from that with the metaverse, largely because again, we we don't even have a full satisfactory definition of what the metaverse is going to be yet, so it's

kind of hard to get to the plateau of productivity. Um. But a lot of us, I think are a little more disillusioned by the promise of the metaverse than uh than h hyped for it. Anyway, once folks got a good look at what VR could and more importantly, couldn't do back in the nineties, we had that trough of disillusionment real hard, and for the scientists and engineers and programmers and such who were working in the VR field,

that was a total disaster. That sudden decline and interest meant that it was really hard to get financial support to do research work in the field because like it just wasn't popular. If something is not popular and people have turned against it, it's very hard to convince the folks who manage money to pour it into that field. So some folks who are researching ways to use VR and say therapy, found themselves cobbling together systems from the

DEO game components. Video game consoles became like a popular go to source two kind of Jerry rig a VR system out of all these different parts. So that was still happening. There were still great work being done in R and D, but the general consensus was there was no money to be made in creating full systems. So it's not like you could just go and buy a virtual reality system off the shelf. And to be clear, like when I was talking about Dactyl Nightmare, we weren't

talking about home virtual reality at all then. This was These were systems that were far too large and bulky and unwieldy and expensive for the average person to get one and have it installed in their home. VR continued in these years, but in a much more modest way, and there were a few attempts to bring VR into home gaming, but most of those, like for example, there was a planned VR set that was meant for the sake of Genesis, a lot of those would get shell.

The ultimately just decided that this was too much work and too much expense and there wasn't going to be enough payoff, and those projects were largely abandoned. Now flash forward more than a decade until we get to two thousand nine, Palmer Lucky, the creator of Oculus, had started building head mounted displays. Not this point, technology had improved significantly. Flat panel displays where a possibility that really brought down

the bulk and weight of headsets. The development of powerful processors for smartphones would ultimately be leveraged to handle processing for a lot of VR systems which helped reduce latency and boost resolution and also increase your field of view. That's how many degrees of vision you have from side to side within a mixed reality headset. Now, in two thousand and twelve, Palmer Lucky launched a Kickstarter to fund the development and manufacture of the first Oculus developer kit.

And it would be an over so qplification to say that the Oculus solely made VR a viable possibility. Again, that's that's dismissing tons of work from other people and other companies. However, the Oculus, I think would you could argue, was easily the most visible example of VR technology that could at least approach the old promise of VR and make something that was a decent implementation of that promise.

So the dreams of the eighties and nineties were unrealistic at the time, but the Oculus seemed to be a little bit closer to what we were hoping for. You know, A couple of decades earlier, other manufacturers would start to make VR headsets too, and there was a push to develop better systems, UH, including ones that would be self contained and others that would require a PC to run software. While the VR system would kind of act as your

display and input device. Now early on, there were a few big obstacles standing in the way of VR adoption. One is that the really early VR headsets in this era, the being like the twenty twelve to say Steen or so, most of them required a physical connection to a PC

if you wanted to actually use them. So, like the VR systems around the eighties and nineties, it just wasn't quite possible to have a really powerful VR headset that could stand on its own is, you know, disconnected from any other piece of equipment, So it had to tap into the superior processing power, particularly for graphics processing that a PC could provide. That meant that that provided to

other limitations that would come along with this requirement. One would be that a user would be physically tethered to a computer. There would be a cable connecting their headset to the computer system that would limit their movement. They could potentially get tangled up in cables that could be awkward or even dangerous, So it really was a limitation in the technology, one that programmers would really have to take into account when they were creating their VR experiences.

Like you wouldn't want to create a VR game for example, that would require people to have to physically turn around frequently, because potentially you're just talking about tangling them up in wires. I mean maybe if you're sadistic and also a game developer, you'd want to do that, but you know, ethical programmers wouldn't. But the other big hurdle on top of this tethering

was and is cost. Oculus offered a couple of different developer kit models during its crowdfunding phase where you're talking about relatively low costs, I mean in the early early days of Oculus. So these developer kids were intended to go to people who would create VR experiences, right. It was meant for people who wanted to build stuff that folks could experience within VR. This was not meant as

a consumer model. However, Obviously there were a lot of gamers who really just wanted to get their hands on the next cool toy. They wanted a developer kit, not because they planned on making anything, but because they wanted to experience stuff. Now, that first developer kit was available if you backed the original kick Starry campaign, and I believe it was a three level or higher. That's actually

on the cheap side for VR hardware. But then in those days, there wasn't much you could do with it anyway, You'd have the hardware, but there wasn't a whole lot of software to run on it. So the whole point was that this tech was really just meant to help developers create compelling content for the system, because without the content, it's really hard to sell the system. This is the

same thing we've seen with video game consoles. H In fact, I think that the most recent Xbox console really suffered from this problem that there was a perception and that the Xbox Series X lacked enough exclusive, compelling content to justify buying the console, whereas people were looking at the PlayStation five and saying, there's a long list of exclusive titles for this this console. There there's a great library

of content. I want a PS five, And so getting a good library of content is absolutely critical in order to sell a platform. Now, when Oculus launched its original consumer model, so this is beyond the developer kids, this is when they're ready to actually go to the store shelves. The first Oculus headset released Bioculus itself was the Rift, and the asking price was six hundred bucks. Now you're talking about the cost of a full video game console system.

And keep in mind this is without the PC you would need to actually run the ding dang darn thing. Oculus was recommending that users have a PC with at least eight gigabytes of ram uh and the equivalent of an Intel I THREEPU and a g Force g t x nine sixty or a m d f x forty three fifty graphics card or better, as well as Windows eight or more recent operating system. That was actually a step down from what they were originally going to suggest

users make sure they had. They They brought down the system requirements, not because the tech suddenly got more efficient, but probably more because Oculus wanted to diffuse some of the complaints that the system requirements to run the hardware at the recommended levels would mean you would need a like a thousand dollar PC on top of the six hundred dollar headset and controls, and now we're getting into

really expensive territory. As it was, by reducing those requirements, it was closer to like a five dollar PC, So you're still talking bucks total in order to have a working RIFT and PC combo, assuming you didn't already have the computer at your disposal. If you already did, if you were a gamer who already had an incredible system, then you were pretty much set. But for anyone who just wanted to get into it, this was a really big barrier to entry. So uh, cost is another hurdle

to the adoption of virtual reality in general. It still is today. One thing that was monumental in Oculus is history between when it was developing its first system and when it released it was that Meta, which was just Facebook back then, acquired Oculus, so Meta bought Oculus. This was also when it became clear that Facebook would add

another requirement to using Oculus hardware. Users would need to link their system to a face Book account, so if you didn't have one, you had to create one and link your account to your Oculus hardware, which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. There were a lot of VR enthusiasts, people who have been supporting Oculus since the kickstarter days, who were absolutely furious with the idea that this was going to have to be tied down

to a Facebook account. These days, by the way, that has changed at least a little, because now you no longer need to link your Oculus hardware to a Facebook account, you just need a meta account. And you might say that's a pretty fine distinction, and I would probably agree with you. All Right, We've got more to talk about when it comes to the challenges of VR adoption and how that blaze into the metaverse. But first, let's take

another quick break. Okay. So, one way to address cost as a barrier to entry into any kind of technology is for the company that makes the tech to sell it at or below the cost of manufacturing. So, in other words, the retail price for the item is the same or perhaps even less than what it cost you to make it in the first place. Now, why would you do that. You would lose money on every unit

you sold. Well, if you're counting on the hardware to be a conduit for an ongoing source of revenue from customers, then it might be worth it to take a loss on the hardware sales price. Console manufacturers do this all the time. They sell customers a console that is near or sometimes below cost, and then they count on game sales and things like subscription services like Xbox Game Pass

to make up for that gap. So, yeah, they lose money selling the console but they make money by selling you games and services, and so the console is just the entry point to to grab you as a customer and to keep you for as long as they possibly can. You could benefit too out of it. It's not like

it's purely parasitic. This is a symbiotic relationship here, but it is sort of the The gamble that these companies make is that they'll sell these these initial pieces of hardware for a lower price than what it costs to make them. Often, not all the time. Not everyone does this, but a lot of companies do. So let's talk about some of the other Oculus models and then later what would be branded as Meta Hardware. Because the name has changed.

The Meta has eliminated Oculus as a brand essentially and replaced it with Meta. So the actual hardware the brand names have stayed the same, but the or at least the model names, i should say, have stayed the same,

but the brand has changed from Oculus to Meta. That, by the way, also rubbed a lot of Oculus supporters the wrong way because Meta, when it made the change, made the statement that they weren't making any changes to any of their various brands, although they didn't mention Oculus at the time, and people say, well, the reason they didn't mention Oculus is that was a decision they had already made. They were getting rid of Oculus as a brand name. But anyway, in the company, Facebook shipped the

Oculus Go. Now, unlike the Rift, the Go was a standalone headset, so you didn't have to tether it to a PC. You had a headset that could be free of that cable connecting you to a computer. The headset used a Qualcom snap Dragon eight twenty one processor, which is the kind of processor you might find in a smartphone, and it ran on a version of the Android operating system and could run apps specifically designed for mobile based

VR experiences. Now, the Oculus Go was more aggressively priced at one dollars for the base model, which was a thirty two gigabyte storage model, or you could go up to the sixty four gigabyte model for two still much cheaper than the six d dollar asking price for the original Rift. However, it was also much more limited in power compared to the Rift, right because the Rift, again

was being powered by a PC. So depending on the type of PC you were using to send signals to your Rift, you would be having an incredibly sophisticated experience when compared to an Oculus Go, which was running more at a smartphone level. Now, Facebook would take the Oculus Go off the market in the summer of Essentially the Go was being replaced. In fact, was already in the process of being replaced by a newer headset, the Oculus Quest.

Now the Quest it actually debuted in the spring of so there was some overlap between Oculus Go and Culus Quest. The Quest, like the Go, is also a standalone headset that runs on Android. It has more features than the Go did, and the cost reflects that. Because the base model of the Oculus Quest was introduced at three nine dollars. This was a sixty four gigabyte model, and the higher model,

the hundred twenty eight gigabyte model, was four d dollars. Now, that's still cheaper than having to buy both headset and a new PC. But the Quest could not measure up to the graphics quality of a PC based VR system, so there were trade offs. Yes, you didn't have to spend as much money as you would for one of the more sophisticated systems, but then you wouldn't have the capabilities of those more sophisticated systems. Now the Quest would

also get a successor. It got a successor in twenty twenty, called the Oculus Quest two, which these days is now called the Meta Quest Too. Originally, the base model of this hardware was priced at two dollars for sixty four gigabytes, and then the hud gigabyte version was Interestingly, starting this month, which is August of twenty two, two years after the Oculus Quest to debut, the price of both models has

now increased by one dollars. That's unusual because typically you see price tags for tech go down after they've been out on the market for a couple of years. But that's not what we're seeing with the Quest Too. So imagine like you went to buy a PlayStation five and you find out that now the PS five regular retail price has gone up by a hundred dollars. You'd say, well, not only has this console been out for a while, uh, it hasn't been readily available because of chip shortages and such.

Why is the price going up? Why would Facebook now Meta hike the price tag of this older technology. Well, there are a lot of potential reasons. One of them is that the company is struggling to attract new users and to grow as a company. Remember that company successes is tightly tied to company growth in the stock market, and when you're not growing, investors start getting nervous because they feel like they're not going to get a good

return on their investment. That's an oversimplification, it's also true, so so so Facebook Slash Meta has spent billions of dollars on mixed reality and metaverse initiatives. These are not going to pay off for years to come. Mark Zuckerberg has said as much. This is not me passing judgment

on Meta. Mark Zuckerberg has said it's going to take years of research and development to create the metaverse, and so we're going to be pouring billions of dollars and investments into that that realm, and it will be a while before we see that mature, to see it emerge. So you could say that maybe increasing the price tag of these devices, which have been on the market for two years already, is more about Meta trying to lose

less money. It's not about them trying to make money off selling the hardware, but maybe have less of a loss as they sell the hardware, Because when you're talking to your investors on an earnings call and your lost numbers from your Reality Labs division are raising eyebrows, you start to think, maybe there are ways I can control spending a bit more while still investing in the field, because I still believe that this is I'm projecting into

Mark Zuckerberg now, but I still believe in the metaverse idea. In order to get there, We're still going to have to invest, which means we are going to have to spend money, which means at the end of the day, when we have an earnings call, it's going to appear as a loss for that department. Maybe I can limit those losses in different places to take some of the sting out while we're also trying to increase our revenue in other arenas. Anyway, the hardware cost issue for the

consumer hasn't really gone away. I've talked exclusively really about Oculus in this series or this episode rather, but there are lots of other companies that are making VR sets, whether they are standalone's, like some of them make a VR equipment where you slot a smartphone into a headset and the smartphone acts as your processor and display. Others go the full custom equipment approach. Some are tethered to PCs, some aren't, and they come at a range of prices,

but they all tend to be pretty expensive. And this range, by the way, also creates confusion in the market, right because not all VR is the same. Something that's smartphone power it is not going to look or play like something that's running on the top of the line gaming PC. So for a lot of people that that price is a prohibitive barrier to entrgue to get into virtual reality.

That also serves as an obstacle that companies like Meta are going to have to figure out a way around if they want to bring their vision of metaverse whatever that might turn into, into reality. If they want to have the same kind of level of adoption for the metaverse as what they've seen for social networking sites, they have to figure out this cost problem, because with that price tag being that high, it's going to prevent tons of people from taking part in it, and then your

metaverse is a nonstarter. Like if I can afford to get into the metaverse, but none of my friends hand, then where's my incentive to get into the metaverse? Like if if everyone I know and love isn't able to access it, then it doesn't have a whole lot of appeal to me. So that's an issue that has to be solved. Now, let's jump back into motion sickness, because that's another big hurdle to the adoption of VR and

thus a potential stumbling blog on the way to the metaverse. So, motion sickness from VR is often called cyber sickness, and for some people the VR experience can be so unpleasant due to motion sickness that they'll swear it off after

one bad experience. But interestingly, some folks at Iowa State University recently did a study on cybersickness and they wanted to test to see how long it would take people to adapt to the VR experience where they don't get cybersickness, or if they do, their symptoms are much less severe. That study observed that people who are prone to cybersickness usually start to feel the symptoms within ten minutes of

their VR experience. That is not very long. Like, if within ten minutes of trying out of technology you start to feel sick, it could be a real tough cell to convince you that this is a technology you should be purchasing for your own use. The symptoms are pretty much the same as motion sickness. You know, you have nausea, headaches, dizziness, sweating, you get a sense that you're still moving even when you're you're sitting still. That to me is the worst.

You also can have I fatigue. I think that might have more to do with the fact that you're looking at a screen that's just a few inches away from your eyes. But because I don't I don't associate eye fatigue with motion sickness. But it is a symptom of cybersickness frequently. Now, if you've ever felt cybersickness or seasickness, or really any kind of motion sickness, you know how unpleasant that can be. And as I get older, I

find myself more prone to it. Unfortunately. UM I'll never forget the time my wife and I did a park hopping trip at Disney World. We experienced three attractions that had VR elements to them. The first was Flights of Passage at Animal Kingdom. It's an Avatar themed VR ride. It's incredible. I still have never seen the movie Avatar, so I was writing this ride going I don't know what's happening, but it's pretty amazing. The second one we

rode with Star Tours, which is at Hollywood Studios. That's, of course, the Star Wars themed VR ride. The third was Soaring, which is a ride where you sit on what's essentially a giant swing as you are in front of a huge panoramic screen that that has a projection film that gives you a sense that you're flying over various landscapes. And afterward, my wife and I both felt a little off. But it wasn't until we went to watch a three sixty degree panoramic film and Epcot that

we realized we had overdone it. And we spent many of the following hours sitting on a bench in Epcot's World show Case pavilion and feeling on the verge of being sick. Thankfully, neither of us went beyond the verge, but we were right up to the edge. And cybersickness is very much the same sort of thing. I mean,

it really was cybersickness that we were experiencing. And you know, when I first played an Oculus and early Developer kit version of the Oculus, I was put into a spaceflight simulator type game and within minutes discovered that I was not feeling well. So what's actually going on? Well, your inner ear and your brain are getting some mixed signals. Uh. These things help you maintain your balance. They detect things

like acceleration. And when your brain is getting input that suggests you're moving around like crazy, and then another part of your brain is saying, hang on, we're totes not moving at all, then there can sometimes be a problem. This dissonance between these bits of our nervous system can cause us to feel sick. Now I like to think it's the brain saying I have no idea what's happening, Just go make them throw up, and then the brain

storms out of a adored lambs it behind it. I don't know where the door goes to, but that's what I think. That's probably because of Homer Simpson. It's probably not what's going on from neurological perspective, but it makes me contextualize it. Anyway, back to Iowa State University, the researchers got a test group of a hundred fifty undergrads. Because I mean, if you've got undergrads that's essentially guinea pigs, go ahead and throw them into an experiment and these

undergrads would play a VR game. Uh They started with a game called Jurassic World Aftermath, and the researchers said that they wanted to pick a VR title that was exciting enough so that players would want to continue playing the game. They would only stop if they weren't feeling well, instead of stopping because the game was boring. So they needed a game that was going to be compelling enough that the reason why someone would stop wouldn't be because

they hated the game. So as the students played the game, they were asked every four minutes to kind of rate how they were feeling feeling, using a ten point scale to indicate, you know, were they feeling really sick or were they feeling fine? And some folks would stop earlier than others because of cyber sickness, and they would come

back to do additional sessions throughout the week. The researchers observed that through exposure, people would gradually get more used to VR and feel fewer or less intense symptoms of cybersickness, and they found that three twenty minute sessions in a week could lead to significant improvements. They also, however, noted that there were outliers who showed less progress, Probably they

are not a good fit for VR. And the study also found that in general, women have a harder time to adjust to VR and reduce symptoms of cybersickness than men do. That's not to say that's true across the board, It's just that it was something that was more of

a tendency they observed. That is a tough sell because you are asking customers to buy into a technology that costs a few hundred to several hundred, maybe even more than a thousand dollars, especially if you want to top end system, you might be talking about more than two grand, or or that might just be a starting point if you want to really sick gaming rig that can also run VR. And on top of all that, the experience of using the equipment can be unpleasant, at least at first.

So for some people it might be insurmountable, which means they'll likely be left out of any metaverse implementation that depends upon mixed reality as an interface. So this is one of many reasons why I am skeptical of the metaverse. I just see that there are a lot of challenges we have to overcome in order to make it something

that the general population can easily interact with. If it's not something the general population can easily interact with, it represents an enormous digital divide where the people who can afford it and the people who aren't getting sick from using it are able to access it, and the rest of us can't, which means all those amazing capabilities that are being promised in these discussions of the metaverse will

only apply to a small slice of the population. That's why I am majorly skeptical of the metaverse, and I'm wary of it, uh, even as I have to talk about it and occasionally sit on panels about it. So anyway, I thought I would really take the specific perspective of how virtual reality fits into that metaverse picture and use that for our tech Stuff tidbits that now is officially longer than most of my regular episodes. You're welcome, all right,

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