Ten years ago it seemed that the fate of the world was virtual reality. A boy had presented his idea for a revolutionary viewer on Kickstarter, a web platform where to raise money. He had called it Oculus. Within hours, he had raised the goal of $ 250,000. But then the collection had touched 2 and a half million dollars. A triumph. That boy, Palmer Luckey, became a celebrity and soon became rich too, as he passed his technology over to Mark Zuckerberg. In short, if we talk about Metaverse today it is also thanks to him.
The teleported hologram as in Star Wars: the metaverse is among us
by Riccardo Luna
April 19, 2022
But ten years have passed and virtual reality is a long way from having kept its promises. It is not just the sales of the viewers that are modest, it is their use that is insignificant. Months ago I bought a model to play with my son and since then he has been collecting dust on a shelf. Every now and then we wear it hoping to find something new but the impression is always the same: few programs, a barely decent user experience, and strong discomfort after ten minutes that you have the viewers in front of your eyes. Not my problem: on the net there are dozens of forums more or less entitled “virtual reality sucks”. This does not mean that there is not already some useful application, perhaps for teaching, or in industry or medicine. And certainly there are military applications as evidenced by the success of Palmer Luckey’s new startup. But the road to the Metaverse is longer and less crowded than the marketing and investments of tech companies suggest.