On February 7th, well-known technology founder Phil Libin (Phil Libin) said after trying the first metaverse product of Facebook parent company Meta, Meta’s vision of the metaverse is “completely unrealistic. Outdated Ideas.
Libin, a former co-founder and CEO of Evernote, left in 2015 to enter the venture capital industry. When Libin put on an Oculus VR headset to experience Meta’s first Metaverse product, he hoped it wouldn’t feel too bad.
I had a very strong intuition that it was going to be bad; but I went through it with as many expectations as possible, hoping to be pleasantly surprised,” Libin said in an interview.
At the time, employees at Libin and its videoconferencing company Mmhmm were trying out Meta’s Horizon Workrooms product. Horizon Workrooms lets users use virtual reality headsets to participate in online work meetings in the so-called Metaverse.
Libin said his intuition proved correct. “Just a few minutes,” he said.
Introducing virtual reality to meetings isn’t as appealing as familiar technologies like Zoom, Libin believes. After all, users can still drink coffee while using Zoom. “If I had a giant plastic on my face, I would spill hot coffee all over the place,” Libin said.
The term “metaverse” comes from science fiction and refers to users accessing the internet through immersive technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality devices. Mark Zuckerberg in particular has embraced the idea, renaming his social media company Facebook to Meta last October.
In its fourth-quarter 2021 earnings report released last Wednesday, Meta said that its metaverse business, which includes virtual reality and augmented reality, lost $10 billion and that its original social media user base shrank for the first time in its history. Meta shares plunged 26.4% on Thursday, wiping nearly $240 billion off its market value, the biggest one-day drop in U.S. corporate history.
Libin has previously been critical of the hype surrounding the Metaverse. He said that the metaverse that Meta describes is one that lets users experience “interconnected 3D worlds for extended periods of time every day, mostly through virtual reality,” but “that set of things is terrifying.”
“The idea has been around for a long time,” Libin said. “It’s not very creative. We’ve tried many, many times over the past 40 years, and it never worked.” Proponents of the metaverse believe that people will have to wait to see the full potential of this scenario, but he doesn’t think that’s how so-called great technology works, Libin said.
“I think great technology can be primitive and low-level at first, but it can become great very quickly,” he said. Over time, Libin believes, great technology becomes “more refined and more sophisticated.” mature and more complex”.
He gave the example of early video game consoles and talked about his first purchase from Amazon in the mid-1990s. “This was my first online transaction and it was done through Amazon.com. Amazon was super primitive in the mid-90s, it was like a text-based site where all you could do was buy books from it, and there was no one-click checkout, the functionality is very, very basic. But I bought a few books and I remember feeling like, ‘This is awesome.'”
As for Horizon Workrooms, Libin said, “It’s not good right now, and it’s not going to get any better. It seemed silly at first, but it just got more complicated, and it’s still bad.”