Facebook is trying to shuck off its reputation for manipulating elections and destroying societies by becoming “Meta,” the Metaverse company.
We have an explainer on the metaverse, but in short, a metaverse is a persistent, open virtual- or augmented-reality platform. Metaverses have existed for decades; Second Life once had a million users. Meta, of course, wants to take that from the millions to the billions.
Everyone involved in 5G is betting on metaverses, too. Qualcomm calls its approach “XR,” or extended reality. Microsoft calls it “MR,” mixed reality. T-Mobile’s President of Technology Neville Ray told me that “eyewear wearables” could be the killer consumer app for true 5G, and that’s how you get into the metaverse.
There’s a big difference between Facebook’s metaverse and the one the 5G players want. It’s important, and it goes to why Facebook’s vision is so grimly dystopian. But the 5G metaverse is also reliant on technologies that are years away. They exist, on paper, but the process of actually building them is going to be long, difficult, and expensive.
AR vs. VR vs. MR vs. XR
Facebook’s metaverse dreams seem largely dependent on VR, which takes people out of their bodies and places and puts them in a virtual space.
So many science-fiction dystopias have been based on this. So many. This is Ready Player One; this is Wall-E; this is The Matrix. VR is where people let their bodies rot and the world crumble around them as they try to escape into a wholly owned corporate cocoon. For some video games and the occasional Zoom meeting, it’s great, but the more you use it the more terrifying it gets.
I’ve always taken the (possibly controversial?) position that we are physical bodies in the world, and to totally deny that is perilous. So the VR focus is, in my mind, a big strike-one against Facebook’s metaverse vision.
Facebook/Meta does have an AR project on the table, something called “Project Nazare,” but it says those are “a few years out” compared to shorter-term VR solutions.
The 5G metaverse is all about AR—it’s about going out into the world and enhancing it. This is because the Ready Player One world of never leaving your house works just fine with fiber and Wi-Fi 6E—you don’t need 5G. You need 5G when you leave the house.
Microsoft’s HoloLens has shown video games where online “ghosts” appear in a room and enterprise solutions where virtual repair manuals sit next to the thing you’re repairing. As I get older, I also really want the promised feature where people’s names appear over their heads when you look at them.
Both the VR and AR metaverses have complex, difficult problems of data collection, privacy, and regulation, which need to be dealt with through laws rather than purely through technology. But the 5G metaverse, the one where you actually go outside, is a lot more appealing than the near-term VR one where the only thing you see is the inside of a Facebook headset.
A Long Road to the 5G Metaverse
5G can fix some of the problems with existing AR/VR headsets and help people enter the Metaverse. Oculus headsets basically pack in an entire two-year-old smartphone to render their worlds, making them heavy, hot, and with significantly worse graphics than PCs or game consoles can provide.
I described Facebook’s proposal yesterday on Twitter as “fb would like you to live in an interactive world of shitty phone graphics using a sweaty oculus headset.”
With good 5G—the real stuff, not what we have now—headsets will be able to render their graphics remotely, acting just as displays and collections of sensors. This will make them much lighter and much more power efficient.
To get there, though, you need reliable latencies under about 7ms (according to Qualcomm) and another technology called “mobile edge compute,” which puts more computing power in base stations and at local network hubs.
To get there you need standalone 5G networks, which means not relying on existing 4G coverage and instead starting fresh, at least for this application. That means years of painstakingly building new networks primarily relying on new mid-band airwaves, and then knitting them together so metaversers don’t drop down to 4G, 3G, or worse, nothing, while they’re trying to integrate their virtual world with the real one.
Also, nobody has yet solved the optics problems for a good augmented-reality headset. Whether it’s HoloLens or Magic Leap, they all have narrow fields of view and overly complex optics. That’s a problem neither app makers nor network providers are prepared to solve, although maybe Apple—which has been working on an AR headset for years now—will have the answer.
These are all parts of why experts at the University of Oulu say the “real” 5G world may not happen until 2027.
Will This Dystopia Come Fast Enough for Facebook?
All signs are pointing in a “meta” direction. The question remaining is whether Meta, which is really still Facebook, will last long enough to see the change.
Meta doesn’t control network buildouts, and it doesn’t control optics. Its hardware offerings, so far, have been decent, but they’ve all been poisoned by how bad the company’s reputation for data protection has become.
Meta’s three major products all rely on user momentum built a decade ago, before the company’s post-2015 heel turn. If various metaverse providers develop, new users will probably decide to pick a company with a legacy that isn’t quite as poisoned.
The metaverse is a long-term strategy, but Meta needs a shorter-term solution. As it continues to alienate potential users by abusing their data and their trust, Meta may find that this new pivot is both five years too early and five years too late.
