How the metaverse came unstuck over the hardware of headsets
Could the real reason for Meta’s retreat from its vision for the metaverse be that people feel self-conscious wearing headsets and there is suspicion around sinister-looking goggles?
When Meta’s slow and financially painful retreat from its vision for the metaverse finally reached an end point in March, the tech commentariat had plenty to say about the company’s decision to pull the virtual-reality edition of its Horizon Worlds app and scale back its VR game development.
The New York Times even published an RIP The Metaverse tombstone illustration to accompany the news.
But as experts on all sides have strained to pronounce the death of immersive VR, one aspect of the whole metaverse gamble, estimated to have cost Meta around US$ 80 billion, has received less attention. This is the curious role of hardware, not software, in the affair.
A question of trust
Cue Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, the 1992 novel that gave us the term metaverse. In a memorably prophetic line from the novel, Stephenson opined, ‘People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do.’
Could it be that the wearing goggles and headsets is the reason why Meta’s metaverse promise never fully materialised?
Product design strategist Kevin McCullagh of Plan, a regular contributor to WORKTECH Academy, certainly thinks so. He believes that Neal Stephenson put his finger on something the tech world still struggles to grasp: ‘For most people, headsets aren’t just bulky. They’re socially awkward. Sometimes creepy. Sometimes faintly sinister.’
McCullagh’s view is that the success of the next wave of AI-enabled robotics and wearables to enter our working lives will depend on ‘whether people feel comfortable using them, being around them, and trusting the companies behind them.’
Clearly, we weren’t comfortable with VR goggles and headsets – and trust in Big Tech is in short supply. Kevin McCullagh suggests that ‘if the industry wants to stop the techlash calcifying into cultural rejection, it needs less gung-ho hubris and more socio-cultural attunement.’ In other words, tech firms need to focus on the social context of use, not just all the whizzy things the tech can achieve.
No-goggle metaverse
Neal Stephenson himself has waded into the debate. Understandably protective of the metaverse as a term he invented, the Snow Crash author points out in an online post that, far from being dead, the ‘no-goggle metaverse’ where you can run around as an avatar in 3D virtual spaces remains wildly popular with hundreds of millions of people: ‘Roblox has something like 380 million monthly active users. Minecraft has something like 60 million. Fortnite has 650 million registered players.’
The problem is when people put things on their faces. Stephenson tells us that Meta’s heavy-framed goggles recall what happened to Google Glass, a development viewed with such suspicion that its users were called ‘glassholes’. He explains, ‘I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that 20 years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wearing Meta Glasses. Image courtesy: Manuel Orbegozo/REUTERS
‘Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces.’
Stephenson goes further: ‘Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible. When someone around you is staring at a rectangle in their hand, it might be incredibly annoying, but at least you can tell they’re doing it. When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not.
‘Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles.’
Appeal to female users
Industrial designers have recognised the trust issues around goggles and tried to rethink headset design. Tom Lloyd of Pearson Lloyd, a firm better known for designing workplace furniture, led the development of a series of prototypes derived from the heritage of the veil and the mask. The aim was to appeal to female users put off by the masculine and militaristic lineage of headset design with prototypes shielding the face with fabric, thus softening any sinister impression.
The Veil prototype for VR goggles: Image courtesy of Pearson Lloyd
VR veil mask references. Image courtesy: Pearson Lloyd
Lloyd believes that real-world self-consciousness is a key reason why people might have given the goggle-wearing metaverse a miss: ‘What we experience behind our VR goggles has a clear impact on our physical state. We have all seen the comedic visions of people swaying about, unstable and insecure, as they teeter on a cliff edge or race down a virtual ski slope.’
The pity is that the thinking behind such radical concepts as the Pearson Lloyd veil headsets, which explore the issue of personal embarrassment, doesn’t seem to have percolated the decision-making of Big Tech.
Where things go next in headset design is anyone’s guess. But one thing is clear. Fifteen years after the tech philosopher Marc Andreessen declared that ‘software is eating the world’, Meta’s retreat from its metaverse vision shows that hardware still matters a lot more than many people realised. And understanding the user perspective might not be a bad idea either.
