Despite recent waves of Big Tech layoffs, billions of dollars have been sunk into virtual reality hardware and software over the past few years.
Walled gardens At the present moment, our cultural imagination of the metaverse surpasses the real thing. In books about the metaverse, you can speed across the world on a motorcycle with katana in-hand, or slip in and out of cyberspace on a mission for artificial intelligences. This later changed when the true potential of the internet was realized and users began freely traversing sites and platforms. Users connected and drew on information from many different sources.
For VR to become the next widely adopted communication channel, the industry needs to move beyond the walled garden phase. To do this, VR needs to increase its interoperability — the ability for programs and applications to be able to integrate and for software to run across VR hardware. Yet, as author and researcher Dave Karpf succinctly lays out in WIRED, while both augmented and virtual reality technologies keep advancing, they have yet to reach the tipping point necessary for widespread social adoption.