Here’s Why It’s Wrong to Illustrate Articles About the Metaverse With Pics of People in VR

This new Time Magazine cover is so utterly wrong that it’s a perfect example of a problem that’s been festering for the last three years: Mainstream media stories about the Metaverse which are prominently (often exclusively) illustrated with images of people in VR headsets.

There’s so many other interesting and original ways to illustrate a story about global leaders about to “Meet the Metaverse” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. But unless the point is to ridicule India’s Prime Minister and others for being totally clueless about the Metaverse — not only wearing HMDs, but highly outdated ones at that — this is the exact wrong way to do that.

There’s at three key reasons why:

The vast majority of people who use metaverse platforms do not access them through VR.

There’s at least 520 million active users in platforms which fit the broad definition of a metaverse platform. The overwhelming majority do so through smartphones.  Only about 8-10 million of them do so primarily in VR, mostly in Rec Room and VRChat, and mostly through Meta’s Quest 2. 

Which brings up an important corollary: With a total install base of about 20-25 million, most premium VR headset owners do not use a metaverse platform.

Wait, an editor might ask — is there even a “definition of a metaverse platform”?

Yes, if you go by Snow Crash, the actual book which coined and painstakingly described it in great detail, and has been a direct reference for people who have been building something like it for the last three decades.

Which takes us to the next point:

In the original depiction of the Metaverse, only the elite use standalone VR to access it.

I am once again begging people who write about the Metaverse or develop a metaverse platform to actually read Snow Crash. The hero accesses the Metaverse through his own VR headset, but it’s strongly implied that most people access it through cheap, dedicated, public terminals.

Even more key: It’s strongly implied there’s a class division to the Metaverse, where it’s mostly the wealthy who use full standalone VR headset rigs.

Some excerpts:

[There’s] a liberal sprinkling of black-and-white people—persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white..

She knows that the people in the [Metaverse] Street are giving her dirty looks because she’s just coming in from a shitty public terminal…

She never thought there’d be Metaverse terminals here on the Raft, but on this ship there’s a whole row of them, so that visiting suits can call back to civilization…

In other words, by illustrating a story about the Metaverse only with standalone VR headsets — as opposed to affordable flat screens that make up the main entry point in actual practice — you are actually missing a crucial theme Neal Stephenson was trying to make! (Which has been borne out in practice: In actual fact, it is mostly the wealthy and the comfortable middle class in the wealthiest parts of the world who own a standalone VR headset.) 

Which brings us to a final, very related point:

Illustrating a metaverse story with VR headsets implicitly promotes Meta’s strategy over competitors.

There are dozens of companies aiming to create a metaverse platform. Only one major player, however, has pinned its metaverse strategy around standalone VR headsets.

To put it bluntly: A world where millions of people connect into the Metaverse with their own personal VR HMD is Meta‘s specific vision of the Metaverse, but it’s not shared by Meta’s competitors.

This vision is not even shared by literal Neal Stephenson! (See below.)

So any Metaverse illustration implied to be VR-only or VR-centric is actually indirect promotion for Meta at the expense of its competitors. 

In this particular case, by the way, Time Magazine is promoting Meta’s vision in a way that’s inaccurate to what the World Economic Forum is actually doing with its metaverse presentation:

WEF executive chairman Klaus Schwab, who has spent decades cultivating in-person interactions between world leaders, hopes the village will serve as a consistent meeting ground for Davos’ stakeholders, transforming the conference from a cloistered one-week gathering to a year-round project. “This could revolutionize global collaboration,” Schwab told TIME in the weeks before the January gathering.

The village is being built using Microsoft Mesh, the computing giant’s still-in-the-works immersive upgrade of its collaboration software Teams. Schwab has already enlisted dozens of partners to populate the village, including Meta and the IMF. The goal is for many of these partners to have virtual buildings in which they can showcase projects. The village will be accessed either through virtual reality—there will be Oculus headsets available in Davos—or via your phone or laptop.

Emphasis mine. Due to Time’s idee fixe around what they assume the Metaverse is, they’re actively presenting a misleading depiction of the news. Let us all avoid making that same mistake!

Thanks to Tom Boellstorff for first pointing this out to me.