Serendipity and the Metaverse

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.

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