AI vs. the metaverse — How artificial intelligence might change the future of the internet – The Mercury News

Ryan Faughnder | Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Remember the metaverse? It was just a couple of years ago when it seemed as if every technology, media and entertainment company was scrambling to adapt to a future in which regular people would live parallel digital lives online, walking around as virtual reality avatars in 3D computerized worlds.

That hype hasn’t amounted to much so far, perhaps because audiences have watched movies like “Ready Player One” and “The Matrix” and absorbed their dystopian lessons.

And, besides, there was a new shiny object. With the emergence of ChatGPT, big tech moved on to a much more immediate and seemingly concrete futuristic subject: artificial intelligence.

Studio heads — from Sony Pictures’ Tony Vinciquerra to Paramount’s soon-to-be owner David Ellison — are banking on AI models to streamline production and save money. Even Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook, which sunk billions of dollars into its metaverse dream, has, like many others, turned more of its focus to AI.

Suffice to say that much has changed in the two years since author and investor Matthew Ball wrote the book “The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything.” Ball, whose essays are highly influential in the spheres of media and tech, has revised and expanded his opus, even giving it a new subtitle: “Building the Spatial Internet.”

When I talked with Ball last week, he certainly hadn’t given up on his ideas about the web of the future, even though AI has clearly eaten the metaverse’s lunch in terms of tech industry enthusiasm and consumer anxiety.

Apple’s Vision Pro has made some progress toward growing the market for headsets, despite its $3,500 price tag and the lingering stigma against wearing a computer on your face. Meanwhile, crypto currencies and other blockchain technologies, which feature prominently in plans for the metaverse, have quietly rebounded after a bumpy period, he said.

Ball also has been writing a bit about the state of the theatrical box office.

This conversation is edited for length and clarity.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the space since you published your original metaverse book a couple of years ago?

The three most substantial shifts are in head-mounted displays, inclusive of wearable glasses, as well as goggles, blockchains, and then artificial intelligence. Each of those three categories seems to have experienced decades of development just in the last two and a half years.

Let’s take ’em one by one, starting with headset computers. Apple comes out with its Vision Pro, and suddenly people are talking about VR and AR goggles again. What happened?

That’s a great example. We saw the category’s most high-profile and probably most important product launch, bringing massive validation of this as a category from a company with unprecedented experience disrupting stale, stagnant or unsuccessful categories and being able to overcome the stigma.

Seeing all of those things come together — Apple’s investment, Apple’s brand, Apple’s retail footprint and their attendant ability to communicate value proposition — is a remarkable case study.

It does feel like the Apple Vision Pro was a chance to take the technology more mainstream. Did it work?

Look, I don’t believe in citing anecdotes as though they’re data, but my followers on Twitter should be as over-indexed to the Vision Pro and head-mounted displays as anyone. I regularly ask those who own one, how many of you used the device within the last 48 hours, and how many of you haven’t used it in the last 30 days?

And the result usually shows that only about 20% of people have used it within the last 48 hours, and two-thirds haven’t touched it in a month. And if you have my followers as an example, who spent $4,000 on a device and after owning it for five or fewer months haven’t touched it for 30 or more days, it’s clear that it’s missing the mark, at least thus far.

Is it a content problem that’s keeping these devices from reaching the masses? Or is it a technology or hardware problem?

The consensus answer is that it’s three different things. It’s the price, it’s the form factor and it’s the applications or content. And right now, all three of those things are limitations, and they’re also interconnected. One of the reasons why the device is uncomfortable and heavy is because it’s high-powered. It’s high-powered so it can run better content experiences. But that also means it’s expensive. If you trade off on the power, the price comes down, but the experiences become diminished.

OK, what about blockchain?

Blockchain has probably gone through puberty over the last two and a half years. Of course, we’ve had the combined market value of cryptocurrencies fall from $3 trillion to $800 billion and then nearly reclaim its all-time high. And along that path, you had the decline of FTX and many others.