People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do

Says Neal Stephenson who first coined the term “metaverse”

This revelation came soon after Meta canceled the Metaverse.

My thought was immediately, will Meta rename itself back to Facebook? We'll get to that soon, but first let's look into Neal Stephenson's mea culpa:

When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that [Metaverse] was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.

Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.

A possible workaround is to keep refining and miniaturizing the devices to the point where they just look like eyeglasses. This, however, turns out to have the unintended side effect of making these things seem sinister. It happened with Google Glass, which instantaneously spawned the term “glasshole,” and it has happened again with Meta’s product that looks like normal, albeit heavy-framed glasses.

When someone around you is staring at a rectangle in their hand, it might be incredibly annoying, but at least you can tell they’re doing it. When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not.

Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it’s creepy.

Timing is everything and 20 years is always kicked around as some "infinite time horizon". It's notoriously difficult to predict when a transition happens and too many times we give up because we were certain how long it would take. That's rather the story of my life.

To remedy this, first, I never thought Magic Leap was interesting. Nor did I bother even skimming stories about Google Glass. I went nowhere near anything made by Facebook/Meta. Did not even try to use any one product, did not read specs, reviews or any other commentary.

I knew the products would not be very good being not much more than demos or experiments. To understand the market, you first need to make a marketable product and these were not good enough.

The goodness here was defined in the absence of creepiness. I've always argued that wearables are easily categorized: just look for places on the body where jewelry is placed and you'll know where wearables will be worn.

Jewelry has been developer for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years and it is inextricably connected to our psyche. Glasses do pass for jewelry but only if they conform to high standards of style. Functional objects rarely are granted status as ornament. Finding that balance is the key. It happened with watches and maybe ladies' hats.

Stephenson is right in saying that face ornaments are difficult "given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible."

That does not disqualify face wearables entirely. It simply needs design thinking and that's what was always what I expected from Apple. The Apple Vision Pro was not meant to be used socially. It does not even work outdoors.

It's a productivity product and one aimed at professionals. Apple will release a face wearable only when it conforms to its principles of user-centric design.

That was not the case for Meta because it is not a company concerned with customer satisfaction. Its business model is to sell users to advertisers and was motivated to enter device development only so as to disintermediate the smartphone. Doing so would remove any impediments to harvesting users data. The priority of user affinity and affection was nice to have but it requires a maniacal attention to even have a chance of success at being loved.

Rebranding around a hypothesis like the metaverse was impulsive but Facebook was a dying brand anyway and having diversified well beyond it, deprecating it was no great loss. Slapping on the Meta moniker was a bark up the wrong tree but not much was lost. I doubt there will be another change unless Zuckerberg falls in love with another way to get rid of its distributors.

NB: Apple never chose to use Metaverse branding. What it developed was spatial computing. It approached the problem not as a content but as a platform and user interface. Will we move to spatial computing en masse to the detriment of "rectangles in our pockets". I don't think that the right question. In reflecting on the past of computing, a new platform did not just replace the previous but created new markets altogether.

Each new interface was an order of magnitude more popular than its predecessor. Keyboard, mouse, touch, each added a few zeroes to the number of users. We are now at nearly 1:1 machine to human. I don't think that this is the limit.

We are entering the n:1 machines to human and wearables are the only way we get there. And as I said, where there is jewelry there will be a machine. Spatial interfaces are more natural as far as our perceived reality is concerned. The rest is engineering.