Oct 31, 2022 · 32m · another-podcast
How many metaverses?
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Tech analyst Benedict Evans and co-host Tony critically examine the metaverse hype by analyzing its narrow VR/AR and broad utopian definitions. Drawing on computing history, they explore interoperability myths, hardware engineering hurdles, and whether human behavior genuinely supports an inevitable shift toward 3D immersion.
Statements from this episode (13)
Evans: The term 'metaverse' has become linguistically meaningless
“Well, in the kind of linguistic sense that the word metaverse contains no meaning. It is meaningless because you do not know what the person speaking might mean by it.”
Evans: Debating separate metaverse regulations is completely ludicrous
“And hence people saying, should we regulate the metaverse, or how will politics work on the metaverse, is just completely ludicrous. It's like saying, should we regulate the mobile internet differently from the internet? Well, no, it's just the internet. And, …”
Evans: VR hardware will unquestionably reach lightweight ski-goggle form factor
“And so you can look at VR and AR and say, like, unquestionably, these things will get way better. The displays will get better. They will get much lighter. We know that for VR. For AR, it's a little bit more open whether the optics will really get us to someth…”
Evans: Gaming Console Install Base Is Only 175M to 200M Units
“You know, the install base of a games console is sort of 20 or 30 minutes, is, is, is like a hundred and seventy-five million units, maybe two hundred million units, if you include Nintendo.”
Evans: Smartphones Are Less Immersive Than Personal Computers
“That a smartphone is actually much less immersive than a PC. You're not sitting in front of it for three hours a day, just looking at that screen. Instead, it's something that you do in 5:10 seconds, you know, that you can pick up and put down. That it's with …”
Evans: Moving to 3D Computing Is a Bigger Shift Than Mobile
“But the other side of it is that most of what we were doing remained in three D, in two D. Text is two D. Pictures are two D. Video is two D. Most of what we do is two D. And so the shift in character to move to three D is actually much bigger than the shift. …”
Evans: Enterprise 3D manipulation is niche because knowledge work is non-spatial
“Most people don't design cars for a living. Most people do not work in three D. Still pretty niche. Salesforce or email, or like most people are not actually editing, doing work that involves a three D object.”
Evans: Software productivity advances via automation and ML, not bigger screens
“I don't think the direction of travel of software is bigger screens. I don't think the direction, or more fundamentally, is not about showing you more information. It's not about having more rows in the spreadsheet. It's having less rows in the spreadsheet and…”
Evans: Designing new tech systems does not eliminate structural gatekeepers
“That's not how technology gets built. And it is sort of, and there's two problems with this. The first of them is like, you're not engaging with the complexity of why there are gatekeepers and, you know, why this stuff works like this. And all the reasons why …”
Evans: Metaverse discourse is an inorganic, utopian wishlist rather than reality
“It's this top-down, centralized, inorganic, deterministic, predetermined, sort of ideal, republic, utopian vision of this is how the internet will work. And it's got all these kind of other ideas attached to it, like I was describing this as like Katamari Dama…”
Evans: Internet interoperability exists only at low infrastructure layers, not applications
“And the thing about, talking about this with the internet, like the internet is completely interoperable, At the lower levels of the stack with IP and HTTP and SSL and so on. But once you're in the browser, like if you're building Amazon, you don't need to wor…”
Evans: Treat Current VR and AR Projects Strictly as Pure Experiments
“And so even if you think that VR and AR are going to work and are going to be the universal thing, think of anything you're doing now as pure experiment, pure learning, pure interest, with no expectation that this is going to be meaningful.”
Benedict Evans: Meta's massive VR spend builds nonexistent hardware supply chains
“It's like, that's kind of why they're spending all this money, because they realize now actually there isn't all the stuff you need to get VR working actually isn't sort of already there waiting to be plugged together the way smartphones kind of work.
and s…”