Source: Irving Wladawsky-Berger, CogWorld Think Tank member

“Is it really the next big thing,” asked The Economist in A reality check for the metaverse is coming, another recent article in “The World Ahead 2023”, its year-end issue which I wrote about last week. “After desktop computing, the consumer internet and the smartphone boom, the consumer-computing industry is past due its Next Big Thing,” said the article. “The coming year will see big tech firms doubling down on two related, much-hyped possibilities. One is virtual- (vr) and augmented-reality (ar) headsets; the idea that, having shrunk computers into our pockets, the next step is to strap them to our faces. The other is the metaverse, which holds that an internet which is still largely flat - based on two-dimensional text, images and video - is ripe for replacement with one that is three-dimensional and immersive, experienced as a sort of globe-spanning video game.”

There is little question that the metaverse and AR/VR headsets are important trends to watch out for in the coming years. As The Economist wrote in a November 2021 article, “as computers have become more capable, the experiences which they generate have become richer. The internet began its life displaying nothing more exciting than white text on a black background.”

The last major advance in user interfaces took place in the 1980s when text interfaces gave way to graphical user Interfaces (GUIS). GUIs were first developed at Xerox PARC in the late 1970s and later popularized by the Apple Macintosh in the ’80s. In the 1990s, GUIs were embraced by just about every PC and user device, and GUI-based Web browsers played a major role in the explosive growth of the internet.

In the mid-2000s, powerful new versions of the Xbox and PlayStation consoles brought order-of-magnitude improvements to the performance of highly visual, interactive video games. These advances promised to usher a new generation of user interfaces not only to video games and other entertainment applications, but to all sorts of so-called serious applications in education, science, health care, government and business. To explore the potential for such applications, I was involved in an experimental project launched by IBM in 2005 based on Second Life, a metaverse-like platform on which users could develop a variety of virtual world applications.

We built several workplace environments on Second Life, and held virtual meetings, online events, museum tours, and other such applications. But, despite our high expectations, we couldn’t find any serious killer apps that offered the user experience of video games, and our project was dissolved in 2008.

Has the time finally arrived for the promise of AR, VR and the metaverse to be realized? Technology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the intervening years, and so has our use of online applications like e-commerce, virtual meetings, e-learning, and telemedicine. Let me discuss the current status and promise of AR, VR, and the metaverse.

Augmented Reality

AR comprises a set of technologies that superimposes computer generated digital data, images and animation on real world objects. Many AR applications are focused on entertainment and delivered through smartphone and tablet apps, e.g., Pokemon Go and Snapchat. But AR is being increasingly applied to a variety of industrial and medical applications and delivered through hands-free wearables such as AR headsets and smart glasses.

In 2019 I attended a very good presentation, Why Companies Need an Augmented Reality Strategy, by Harvard professor Michael Porter and James Heppelmann, CEO of PTC, an industrial software company. The presentation was based on their Harvard Business Review (HBR) article of the same title.

“While the physical world is three-dimensional, most data is trapped on two-dimensional pages and screens,” said their HBR article. The constraint of dealing with highly complex products is no longer a lack of data and insights, but rather, how humans best assimilate and act on the massive amounts of product-usage data that can now be gathered, stored and analyzed by a variety of applications. This gulf between the real and digital worlds requires people to mentally translate the volumes of 2-D information now available to us for use in a 3-D world. That isn’t always easy, as anyone can attest who’s assembled IKEA furniture by following its associated step-by-step instructions, or who’s tried to learn how to use their new car’s entertainment and navigation system, let alone a technician attempting to diagnose and fix a serious problem in an elevator or a jet engine.

AR enables a new information-delivery paradigm, wrote the authors. “By superimposing digital information directly on real objects or environments, AR allows people to process the physical and digital simultaneously, eliminating the need to mentally bridge the two. That improves our ability to rapidly and accurately absorb information, make decisions, and execute required tasks quickly and efficiently.”

Virtual Reality

While AR overlays data and images on the real world, virtual reality is a computer-generated simulation that makes its user feel as if they’re immersed in a 3D virtual world. Users experience and interact with their virtual environments through their immersive VR headsets which can track and react to movements of users’ heads and eyes, as well as through haptic technologies that can simulate the experience of touch enabling users to control virtual objects. VR headsets and applications were first developed in the 1980s, but have significantly advanced over the past few decades.

VR has been particularly successful in video games. “The video game industry - the only type of entertainment fully exposed to the compounding power of Moore’s law - has been selling virtual worlds for years,” wrote The Economist in its November 2021 article. Online games like World of Warcraft, Fortnite, and Roblox have hundreds of millions of users while their gaming companies have high valuations, - evidence that immersive virtual worlds can be both popular and profitable.

VR applications have been developed in a number of domains besides video games, such as virtual concerts in the entertainment industry; meetings, conferences, tradeshows, and job fairs in the business world; and a variety of applications like flight simulators, astronaut training, military training, and medical education.

Metaverse

As we’ve seen, AR/VR technologies promise major advances in user interfaces, headsets, and applications, all of which have been underway for a while as part of the incremental evolution of the internet. But, the promise of the metaverse is more profound, namely the replacement of a largely flat, two-dimensional internet, with a three-dimensional, immersive internet. That would truly be a Next Big Thing.

But, how realistic is such a metaverse promise? In an attempt to shed some light on this question, I read a number of recent articles that approached the question by comparing VR with the Metaverse. For example, this article defines metaverse as “an online, open, shared, persistent, three-dimensional virtual realm that offers people to connect with each other from all parts of their lives. It would link many platforms, same as how the world wide web connects several websites using one browser. … The parallels to virtual reality are impossible to overlook while reading about the Metaverse. Nevertheless, there are a couple of significant differences.”

The first major difference is that while virtual reality is well defined, the metaverse isn’t. “The Metaverse, as per Mark Zuckerberg, is an embodied network where you are present in the material rather than just watching it. According to the latest Microsoft release, it is also known as a persistent digital environment populated by related technologies of people, places, and objects. When we compare our own understanding of virtual reality, these descriptions might feel to be pretty vague. It’s also likely that even IT corporations lack a comprehensive description.” This is not surprising given that VR has been around for almost four decades, while serious metaverse development is relatively recent.

Another article, adds that there’s no clear definition of the metaverse. “Some definitions of the metaverse present it as an open, shared, and persistent digital world, while some define it as an embodied internet. As a result, you can find only vague descriptions about the metaverse in comparison to the ones about virtual reality.”

In other words, as with other potentially transformative technologies, it takes time to know how they will play out. “No one is quite sure whether vr, ar or the metaverse is really the future of computing, said The Economist in conclusion. “But overnight revolutions are not how technology works. Apple did not invent the smartphone out of thin air. It perfected a formula that its competitors had been working on for years, in the form of BlackBerry phones and Palm handhelds, for instance. That does not guarantee that the companies piling into these trendy technologies will succeed. But it shows why they are trying.”

Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a Research Affiliate at MIT's Sloan School of Management and at Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan (CAMS) and Fellow of the Initiative on the Digital Economy, of MIT Connection Science, and of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.