Serendipity and the Metaverse

In the Meta promotional video, we see numerous sequences where users are actively exploring a fully virtual environment—particularly when playing games or exercising. Needless to say, this requires a lot of empty space to make it work in practice. Having a fencing match with a virtual opponent in the middle of a tropical rainforest may sound appeal... See more

I am generally pretty skeptical about this transition, in part because Zuckerberg keeps talking about it as a radical improvement in our sense of “presence” online. I think both the mass adoption of—and the frustrations we all feel about—Zoom has shown that there is still a massive amount of headroom left in terms of improving the quality of straig... See more

For most of us, I suspect, presence doesn’t mean dressing up as an oversize robot floating in a space station. It means experiencing our friends and family through the full bandwidth of human connection: facial expressions, subtle vocal cues, all experienced in an environment that we can feel and touch with our unmediated senses.