As the idea of the metaverse has become more popular, people from comedians to Wall Street analysts have described it as a vague corporate cliche that has little chance of working. Some of the criticisms of the metaverse have been shot down by a new poll from McKinsey.
It found that people in Gen Z, Gen Y, and Gen X plan to spend four to five hours a day in the metaverse in the next five years. A recent Nielsen survey, on the other hand, found that people watch TV for about five hours a day across many platforms.
The McKinsey study polled more than 1,000 customers between the ages of 13 and 70 to find out what they thought would happen when virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) moved from computers and smartphones to wearable devices (AR).
Immersive computing is still in its early stages, so there is still a lot of competition to make it popular.
The most well-known metaverse item is the Meta Quest 2 VR headset. Most people use it to play games. This could change soon. In the next five years, the most interesting things for people to do in the metaverse, according to the report, will be immersive shopping, telehealth visits, learning, traveling, and socializing in VR or AR.
There aren’t many easy-to-use immersive gadgets yet, which is one reason why mass adoption based on these forces is still a few years away. Soon, customers might have more choices, and Meta might have to deal with more competition. Bytedance, which owns TikTok, is reportedly getting ready to release its Pico standalone VR headset in the coming months.
Most of the best AR gadgets are sold for hundreds of dollars by Microsoft and Magic Leap. But Meta, Google, and other companies are getting close to making cheap and cool AR smart glasses for regular people. Reports say that Apple will show off its immersive wearable device in January 2023.
Most users will need to switch to a new way of using computers to get the most out of the metaverse.
Even with all of these improvements, immersive interfaces are often strange and hard to use compared to, say, an iPhone. Before people can move on to the next generation of computers, this will need to be fixed.
“[Current AR smart glasses] give you a metaphor that looks like an Android phone on your face. So rectangles floating in space. That’s not enough for [mainstream smart glasses] adoption to happen,” said Jared Ficklin, the chief creative technologist at Argodesign and a former Magic Leap partner.
“Before Windows was developed, you had to understand directory based computing, very few people did. Once the Windows new metaphor was placed on computing, which was based on the 1960s office—putting files into folders and having a desktop—suddenly 30% of the population could understand that, and they began using computers on average, six to eight hours a day,” says Ficklin.
But how can most computer users switch from a two-dimensional office metaphor on two-dimensional displays like smartphones, tablets, and PCs to a three-dimensional immersive metaphor in glasses and goggles?
“Mapping” will be the new metaphor, says Ficklin. “We need to take the way that we, as humans, think of geography in terms of mapping and create a computer metaphor. [We will use] the language of landscape, layers, and objects.”
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