Lessons From the VR Craze of The 1800s
Victorians went wild for stereoscopes—the virtual reality of the industrial revolution
VR is one of those technologies that always seems just around the corner.
Recently we got a fresh round of chatter about it, when the-company-formerly-known-as-Facebook released its new Quest Pro headset. The quality on that headset is higher than ever, and Meta has poured $15 billion into its attempt to build a metaverse. But not a lot of people are using this new realm. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that only Meta had barely 200,000 monthly active users for Horizon World (its main metaverse offering) — many fewer than the 500,000 they predicted they’d have a year ago. Plus, “most visitors to Horizon generally don’t return to the app after the first month, and the user base has steadily declined since the spring”. Worse, “concurrency” — the number of active users logged in at the same time — isn’t great.
Or to put it another way, Meta has spent about … $75,000 per active monthly user. Yowsa.
Granted, maybe that user base will grow rapidly over the next few years. It doesn’t look that way, but with technology, I never say “never”. And since Mark Zuckerberg is heavily incentivized to pivot to VR — not least to distract from the festering civic mess…
