What is the Metaverse?

A few weeks ago, I missed a week after helping someone who promised it wouldn't take long. The week before that I mentioned that I had dipped below the price limit on the Forex account and didn't know what the consequences would be. I was up for the week and had done better that week than the two previous weeks combined. Nevertheless, I was dinged for the infraction. I now have to start over with a new trial account.

By now you've heard of the Metaverse and have heard things like Facebook is betting the company on its success. Hopefully, that's true. We could do without Facebook in the world. So, what is the Metaverse? Metaverse is a brand name for Facebook-specific virtual reality. Basically, it's Facebook VR, which makes sense. A while back Facebook bought out a company that sells VR goggles. It's natural for them to create a VR platform to drive goggle sales.

This is great news for the rest of us. VR has been around at least 30 or 40 years or more. It never catches on with the public. The people who love VR are typically video gamers, 3D chatters and university researchers. Almost everyone else couldn't care less. Something like every ten years a company comes along and tries to succeed in the VR space. It makes a splash then goes away. Hopefully, the Metaverse is more of the same.

VR is marketed as exploring online worlds that we can't explore in the real world, etc. There's some truth to that, but the real truth is that we already have a real life equivalent to VR. It's called dress up dollies. When the founder of Facebook gave a presentation showing off his VR avatar, that was his dolly. It was dressed, so he had to dress the dolly up ahead of time. The VR house where his dolly lives was his dolly's dollhouse.

When all the hype is stripped away, the Metaverse is playing dollies and dollhouses. That's why VR never catches on with the general public. People with children know all about dressing up little people and buying clothes for them and providing housing, etc. Why would VR companies expect people like that to pay money to do it all over again online while wearing a mask as large or larger than a diving mask? ha ha ha

Something else to think about is Google and Microsoft's entries into the VR space. Remember Google Glasses? That was Google failing at the metaverse. Remember Microsoft Hololens? There was an article the other day saying that Microsoft may abandon it. If true, that's Microsoft failing at the metaverse. Both of those companies are smarter than Facebook.

If Facebook follows the historical VR pattern, the Metaverse will make a splash then fade away over time. Facebook has seen the handwriting on the wall. The Facebook software isn't worth buying or subscribing to. Younger people fled it years ago. Now. it's mostly older people posting pictures of their grandchildren. At least, that's what I mostly see when I post my weekly blogs. When I'm not rejecting friend invites from scammers, that is. In fewer than twenty years, the Facebook demographic will have aged out of the platform. Facebook has delayed its inevitable death by buying companies that its younger users have fled to, but that can only work so long. At some point those companies will fall out of favor just like Myspace and Facebook. Retaining customers by buying the companies they're fleeing to is not a viable business model. Facebook may really be betting the company on VR.

Is there any way for Metaverse to work? Something Facebook has that historical VR companies haven't is psychological manipulation of users. If you've read articles about Facebook, you already know that they have algorithms that tell them what mood a user is in. They can tell when an individual is depressed or happy, etc., based on things like sentence length, word usage, chat usage(who the individual does or doesn't talk to, etc), typing speed, grammar usage and so forth. Facebook knows it can trigger people's moods by presenting Likes and such. A real world example is that Facebook can tell if someone is depressed and needs a pick-me-up. They can send a specifically-targeted Amazon ad for a product that, based on the person's profile, the person would like and that the purchase thereof would give an emotional boost. Ads like that that take advantage of the user's emotional state have a high success rate, according to published articles. Obviously, an ad like that would cost more for Amazon.

If Facebook can manipulate the addiction response in Metaverse users that way they do with Facebook users, the Metaverse might last longer than VR splashes usually do, but will it succeed in the long term? Let's hope not. Let's hope this is the inevitable death of an extremely toxic company.

Have a great weekend.