What’s in a word?
Until ChatGPT came along and dominated LinkedIn discourse, everyone was talking about the Metaverse. Remember that? It was going to transform the way we worked, interacted, shopped and played, much as the internet had in the preceding decades. The promise was so great that Mark Zuckerberg invested his whole future in it, even re-branding Facebook as Meta.
Now it’s AI that’ll change the world, supplanting Google and stealing all our jobs. Who knows what trend will dominate the conversation next month? Quantum computing perhaps?
The problem with all of these talking points is that the term used to describe them is so broad it can be interpreted in any way one chooses. Because of this the thing being discussed will simultaneously fail and succeed depending on how you look at it.
We are repeatedly dealing with the technology equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat.
Before the term Metaverse entered the conversation, that virtual world inside the computer was commonly referred to as “cyberspace”, a term made popular (but not coined) by science fiction writer, William Gibson. Despite using it extensively to describe a virtual reality into which many of his characters ventured, even he found the term too ambiguous to have any concrete meaning.
All I knew about the word “cyberspace” when I coined it, was that it seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless. It was suggestive of something, but had no real semantic meaning, even for me, as I saw it emerge on the page.
William Gibson
Despite his objection to the word, he paints, in his books, a far more vivid picture of the digital world as an immersive virtual reality than many modern proponents such as Meta manage to achieve.
I think this says something about the lack of imagination being applied to the concept of the Metaverse.
Cyberspace awaits
My opinion is that Zuckerberg is taking his company down a blind alley. Timing is everything with innovation, and now is not the time. Meta’s dream is akin to the dream that both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had when they saw hand held devices on Star Trek. The technology simply didn’t exist and all attempts to make it happen failed. The eventual success of the iPhone was as much about the coming together of a set of technological advances as it was about Steve Jobs’ (or Jony Ives’) vision.
The metaverse, or cyberspace, or whatever you want to call it, will come to pass. Of that I have no doubt. There will be a virtual and augmented reality gaming industry that is more than just a niche pursuit. There will be commercially successful implementations of VR and AR being used to do productive tasks in the workplace. Just as working in the office has become working from home, home working will, in turn, become working in cyberspace.
But this isn’t something for next year or the year after. I’m not even convinced it’s something for this decade. Why? Because there are simply too many technological hurdles to overcome – seven by my reckoning – and currently hardly any progress is being made on any of them.
So, what are those hurdles? What are the seven big blockers that are stopping virtual reality from taking off?
Hurdle 1: Heavy lifting
The first blocker, and one of the most obvious ones if you’ve ever tried staying in VR from a prolonged period, is the weight of the headset. Meta’s Oculus Quest 2 headset is 503 grams. Now, this isn’t too shabby for a headset. The Quest 1 is 30g heavier, and the Valve Index is an eye watering 809 grams! However, this downward trend in weight has not been maintained in the newer Meta Quest Pro which weighs in at 722 grams.
It’s almost as if Meta thinks weight doesn’t matter. As an owner of both the Quest and the Quest 2, I can assure you that weight very much does matter. Wear either one of these headsets, with the standard strap supplied with them, and after an hour of constant use you’ll be very grateful to get that weight off your head, and more importantly your face.
Then there’s the red lines all over your face and the helmet hair to deal with. Not a pretty sight.
For the games market, this is an issue, but not a blocker as such. My son will happily tolerate the pain to stay in the game. For him, battery life is the issue, but even he asked for an upgraded strap system for his birthday that helped to take some of that weight off his face and nose.
For the work environment, in my opinion, it’s a deal breaker. Wearing the headset for even 30 minutes can be exhausting and makes so called “Zoom fatigue” feel like a pleasant experience. Ergonomics and workspace assessments have been a standard feature since repetitive strain injury and eyesight became a hot topics for desktop computing. The VR headset experience is a whole new level of potential health and safety issue.
So what would a workable weight look like for widespread workplace adoption? My best guess is around 100 grams. I based this on a couple of factors. Firstly, the range of eyewear weights. Full protection safety goggles can weigh up to 200 grams, whilst a pair of glasses designed for all day wear typically weigh less than 30 grams. Much of the weight of a headset is at the front because of the placement of the optics and screens and so the closest parallel is eyewear.
Safety goggles are a compromise – they protect against significant impact from all directions so there is a trade off between protection and the impact of weight. Where that level of protection isn’t necessary, safety glasses tend to be around the 30 gram mark.
Simply put, years of evolution in the workspace and in the market in general has settled on a range from 20 grams to 200 grams for things humans are willing to stick on their faces for any extended period of time. If you’re going to ask your employees to do exactly that, 100 grams feels like a reasonable (if slightly high) weight to aim for.
With current headsets at 500 grams or more, there’s a long way to go before widespread use in the workplace is palatable.
Hurdle 2: Sensory deprivation
When we enter virtual reality the promise is of a rich and exciting landscape of possibilities, unachievable in the real world. This is brilliantly conveyed in fictional representations. Cyberspace is a heightened experience into which people disappear, no longer stimulated by the mundaneness of everyday life. The reality, however, is very different.
The true VR experience is less one of heightened stimulation and more one of disconnected sensory deprivation. In space, no one can hear you scream, but in cyberspace all you get is sight and sound, and even they are poor reflections of the real thing. Spend any time in virtual reality and you’ll discover just how important those other senses of touch and smell are to your experience.
Smell you can probably live without, but if you’re going to manipulate objects as easily as you do in real life, you’re going to find out very quickly just how important touch is. There is one way to get that sense back though. Walk into or wave your hand through something you can’t see in cyberspace, but that’s very much there in reality.
This is where another serious restriction kicks in. Cyberspace can create amazing environments with vast expanses, but it won’t let you explore them. Take more than a step in any direction and you quickly discover you’re imprisoned in an invisible cage. There are workarounds to this. Joysticks allow you to glide around, or teleport to other locations, and hand motions can be used to simulate walking. But, there’s still that sense of restriction, made all the more frustrating by the apparent space around you.
None of this is a show stopper as such, but it drastically limits the experience and VR definitely falls into the overpromising but underselling category or products.
Hurdle 3: Butter fingers
It’s possible to get past the paucity of sensory input if the creator of the virtual environment achieves things that are simply not possible in the real world. However, there’s another restriction that quickly becomes apparent. As humans we are masters of manipulation. Not in the information sense (although we can be that too), but in the physical sense. Our hands and fingers have evolved to give us a sophisticated ability to handle and interact with objects.
Not so in cyberspace. Kiss goodbye to that hard won dexterity and say hello to the astronaut’s glove experience. The latest headsets are starting to dispense with the clumsy controllers and replace them with hand tracking, but even that is still a poor imitation of reality. The simple act of picking up an object can become surprisingly unpredictable. Writing on a shared whiteboard seems like a great idea until you find yourself writing with all the legibility of a doctor’s prescription.
Couple that with the loss of touch, and the need for special gestures to handle navigation beyond the confines of your physical space, and you have a very unnatural experience. One of the winning features that made the iPhone fly was the intuitive nature of the interface.
Hurdle 4: Blinded by the light
Playing games in VR is far ahead in terms of adoption compared to use in the workplace. One of the reasons for this is that a designer can create a game that is suited to the limitations of cyberspace. With a few simple movements and gestures you can do everything the game needs for an immersive and exciting experience.
The same is not true for the work environment. In this world, the task already exists, and the challenge is to reproduce it in VR. Take 3D modelling as an example. I do a lot of this on my laptop, and make extensive use of both the mouse and keyboard to design objects for 3D printing.
Now, it’s fair to say that moving an object around can be far more intuitive in cyberspace. It takes some practice to do it with a 2D mouse combined with control keys, or even with a 3D mouse, but it’s doable. However, I’m not just shoving a cube around. I’m manipulating complex shapes, working with groups of vertices and positioning things to fractions of a millimetre. To do that I need to enter data. Sizes, positions and angles, often to several decimal places. The keyboard is useful, and virtual replacements are clumsy.
However, when I’m in VR, those tools might as well be a world away – I simply can’t see them.
The headset solution to this is mixed reality. Meta has a solution that places you in a virtual work environment, but allows you to effectively cut “holes” in that construct so you can see through into the real world. This means you can see and use your actual keyboard and other peripherals when it makes sense. Unfortunately, the image quality is poor, and if the intent is to move around your environment, you won’t be near that keyboard and mouse.
Moving around also requires that the space around you is clear, otherwise you’re likely to walk into something. Uncluttered space is not something we generally have a lot of, either at work or at home. To work seamlessly, mixed reality will have to step up and find a way to merge real objects into the virtual world. There are some solutions to this, but they rely on you mapping the real space first.
Even if all that is achieved, you then have the strange situation of placing virtual objects onto real surfaces, or more embarrassingly, trying to put a real object down on a virtual table.
Hurdle 5: Thousand yard stare
Most of these hurdles are probably ones you thought of before, or would have fairly quickly, but the next hurdle is rarely mentioned.
Focal length.
When you look at a real object, your brain orients your eyes onto it, pointing them more or less inwards depending on the distance to the object. It also adjusts the lenses inside your eyes so that the object is brought into focus. The two images received by your eyes are two dimensional, but differ slightly due to the different position of each eye. Your brain combines these images to create a three dimensional model of the world. This is a clever and important balancing act that happens without you even needing to think about it.
VR reproduces this by presenting two slightly different images, one to each eye, reproducing the way our eyes see the world. Our brains can then analyse those differences and construct a three dimensional model of what we’re seeing. However there’s one key difference. In a VR headset, the screens that display those images are a fixed distance away from the eye, and so the brain is always focusing at the same distance regardless of the apparent distance of the object being viewed.
The lenses in a VR headset result in a focal distance of about 1 to 2m. Your focus tells you the object is that far away, but the alignment of your eyes, and your brain’s three dimensional model might be saying it’s far away or nearly touching your nose. This contradictory information can confuse the brain resulting in nausea. For some people this is minor or non-existent, but for others it can be extremely unpleasant.
Even if this feeling can be overcome, it’s not clear what long term effects there might be on our focussing ability in the real world if we spend significant proportions of our working lives in VR. It’s an even greater concern for children who may still be developing the neural connections involved in this process.
For businesses this represents an unknown and unmeasurable risk.
Hurdle 6: Read my lips
Finally, there’s the question of social interaction. It’s not just passive objects that we’re going to be working with in cyberspace. One of the big areas touted as a win for VR is the ability to interact with your colleagues remotely as if you’re all in the same room. Like Zoom, but so much more natural.
One of the main reasons people argue for face-to-face contact at work is “body language”. In Zoom, you just see the face, and even then true eye contact is impossible. If you want to present something, or sketch on a whiteboard, the screenshare takes over and you’re no longer “in the room”. VR promises to fix this, but this presents a massive hurdle. It doesn’t take long to realise that a virtual avatar is a poor substitute for a real person, and even for that two dimensional face on Zoom. At least the face was the real face with real expressions.
Current VR headsets aren’t even remotely close to tracking the face and eyes at all, let alone at the level of accuracy required to reproduce direction of gaze and facial expressions. Then there’s the rest of the person to track. It’s called body language for a reason. Technology is starting to emerge that might be able to do this, but all that extra equipment has to be crammed into that headset.
Weight needs to go down, not up!
Hurdle 7: New year’s resolutions
And so we come to the final hurdle that will prevent that Metaverse explosion we’ve been promised. Resolution.
Screens have come a long way since my first computer. The standard resolution for the first IBM PCs was 640 by 350 pixels and only supported 16 colours at a time. On modern laptops, 2560 by 1080 is not unheard of, and those colours have now gone up to just under 17 million. That’s more than enough to read fairly dense text and examine some fairly complex diagrams on virtual whiteboards. Faces on zoom are less than perfect, but one-to-one you’re still using a fair bit of that screen resolution.
However, things are a bit different in cyberspace. No matter how far away from that real life screen you are, it’s still 2560 by 1080, but in VR that resolution is for your whole field of view. The screen itself is also a lot smaller, so fitting more pixels into it is much harder than when you’re dealing with a laptop screen or a large TV.
Anything you’re looking at is only using a small part of that headset screen and so the further away you are from it the lower the resolution. At the typical viewing distance for a laptop, the screen only takes up at most 1/25 of what you’re seeing (and I’m being generous here). Imagine that screen is now a document you’re trying to read, or someone’s presentation on a wall. To achieve the same level of detail requires a headset resolution of around 12,800 by 5400 per eye.
That’s a lot of pixels to cram into a headset.
In conclusion: Not tonight, Josephine
So, those are the seven hurdles, and these are the improvements that need to be made to VR technology:
- Reduction of weight to no more than 100 grams
- Addition of sophisticated tactile feedback
- Much finer hand and body tracking
- Seamless integration of real world objects into virtual environments
- Adaptive focal length to match viewed object distance
- High detail face and eye tracking
- Much higher resolution screens
You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned the issue of price in this list. Headsets can set you back a fair bit, and for me price is a serious consideration. For others, however, it might not be. If Apple has taught us anything it’s that people will pay a significant amount of money for their internet devices of choice.
Apart from price, each one of these hurdles needs to be overcome if VR is to achieve reasonable levels of adoption as a workplace tool. For each blocker, there are hints of progress, but I believe it will be years before all the necessary advances take place.
In the meantime, the future of the metaverse is not in VR. Well, not the headset variety anyway.
As a closing thought, try to remember all those demonstrations of 3D worlds you’ve seen. Some may have been interesting, others may have been truly impressive, but where did you see them? On a laptop screen.
When it comes to cyberspace, it’s quite possible VR is just the gimmick that stopped people from seeing the real possibilities for interactive and immersive media.