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Why did the metaverse die? Because Silicon Valley doesn’t understand the concept of fun
(www.fastcompany.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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Technology
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i would add cost as a barrier to entry. as cheap as the hardware it, it needed a more heavily subsidized distribution.
apple only exists because they practically gave away equipment en masse to school districts as the market became flooded with 'ibm compatibles'
they built an entire generation of apple-loving folks by dumping huge amounts of money/resources into those programs.
They almost died after that. Jobs putting colored plastic on the outside of Macs saved them.
Well, and them replacing the rotting husk of MacOS 9 with a bastardized version of NeXTSTEP. That kinda helped, too.
Quest2 is $300. That is a pretty reasonably entry price for a Metaverse. Problem there was more that Meta never actually implemented a Metaverse. Putting that thing on your head doesn't launch you into the Metaverse, but just into the home screen where you select apps to launch from a 2D menu. Their whole software stack does a terrible job of making use of the fact that you have a 3D display on your head. They didn't even have basic things like VR180-3D trailers for their games. There were no virtual shops to buy stuff. No cinemas to watch stuff. Just apps you can launch. Horizon World, which was supposed to be their Metaverse, was still just another app to launch and not meaningfully integrated with anything else. PlaystationHome was more of a Metaverse than anything Meta ever build, though even that fell rather short.