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Opinion A year ago, corporate VR floated around on the hype pipe. We weren’t sure. All that investment, all that technology, to create an atmospheric atmosphere that we thankfully missed in the magical world of WFH.
Without imagination, without soul, without humanity, who would want to visit?
Since then, billions have continued to pour into the Metaverse Money Dematerialiser, which resides in Zuckerberg’s basement. The VR revolution doesn’t seem imminent. The CEO himself celebrated the launch of Horizon Worlds in Spain and France by showing the world a dead-eyed robot selfie in the mid-’90s clip art landscape. It was just as horrible as it was a year ago. Where is the money going? Only if you are someone who is hard to answer the question. Think like a large organization.
Here’s one answer: fighting for user privacy. As one of the first steps to protect your VR identity across sessions, an open-source academic project called MetaGuard is already reporting countermeasures. Because that’s what matters to the creator gods of the new universe.
MetaGuard works by injecting noise into signals sent to global servers. Random adjustments to your voice, changing around you, are enough to make the machine unsure if it’s you when you come back for more. It’s a great but flawed effort, and not just because the usual arms race starts. VR needs those cues to be fully immersive, and to make sure you stick with the walled garden model, it needs to be fully immersive. That offers companies two things they couldn’t find on the plain old Internet: comprehensive monitoring and comprehensive control.
This was common in the days before Internet service providers. CompuServe and AOL have downloaded their own dial-up access points that connect your computer to their computers and their computers only. You pay directly into their account per month, receive their service, and chat with other users on their system.
Just when online content was starting to get good, the internet ruined that. The Facebook service is a great effort to rebuild those days, but you can escape those walls as easily as turning a page in a book with one click.
In virtual reality, the equivalent click is literally displacing. The more immersive the environment, the greater the cognitive load on the user. In that environment, you are under total surveillance: you should be. Immersive VR should respond to the physics of your body and the physics of your senses as if it were real, which means it should track as closely as possible. You’re in a body scanner, and the output is feeding Zook’s IS. If you blur or mock it, you increase its uncertainty, but you also lose some immersive fidelity, and that’s rather the point of VR. But just by looking at the site, you know that loyalty improvement measures aren’t the only reason they improve so quickly.
For companies, MetaVersion is a canvas on which to realize their deepest desires, not just to create better worlds for us. In the billions spent on defunct operations, in lock and key, we can see the possibility of building a universe where every corporate wish is fulfilled.
That would not be a place anyone would want to go. It’s bad on the flat earth of the internet, where we have the freedom to click away, install ad blockers and trackers, and, if we choose, customize our experience as we choose. In Metaverse, the right information and the controls needed to access it are displayed on virtual screens in space—and good luck doing anything your corporate sponsor doesn’t want them to do. No off-menu ordering at this restaurant.
We’ve been there – at least, anyone in the CompuServe years knows what it was like when the Internet was an option. When it worked, we ran. Even though the companies behind them have more experience in online services than anyone else, closed gardens have turned into deserts. They had every opportunity to build the best technologies and sites that could compete with the raw Internet. Many, like Microsoft with MSN, have tried too much. They are all dead now.
This is no reason to write off VR in general. The crazy investment has at least produced some decent hardware. Just as early investors in railroads lost their shirts but left valuable infrastructure behind, there is an opportunity to build better ideas. Many people like VR games, and things like virtual conferences seem better if you know and can easily interact with other attendees. None of these use cases will power the corporate universe worth a dime.
nice. Being confined to a platform alone in a totally controlled environment is hell. Imagine what they would do in an immersive environment where no yelling is allowed when Microsoft is trying to hide ads into the desktop UI. Which of the Big Tech companies can control your walls, doors, windows and space in your room? Which one do you think won’t stand a chance in both stalls?
This is why corporate VR will be a glorious flop. It exposes the inability of pocketed tech companies to imagine anything worthwhile by offering the ability to engage in virtual reality where they can find whatever they want. That lack of thought in the worlds experience manifests itself in spending all that you want to do. By highlighting their needs, it shows their inhibitions. If the whole world is you, you have nowhere to hide. ®
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