News:
Disney, Microsoft Say Meh to the Metaverse – WSJ
Meta has spent billions of dollars trying to build out the metaverse since changing its name. But its flagship app, Horizon Worlds, struggled to gain and retain users within the first year after the renaming, according to internal documents viewed by the Journal. Sales of its Quest 2 virtual-reality headsets, which are used to access Horizon Worlds and other virtual-reality apps, were also down in the most recent quarter, the company said.
So, this is the slow gradual end to “metaverse”. There are some interesting papers in this space (published from China!) where they have explored this idea around using metaverse in the lung tumours. I’ll link to it later (with proper summaries), but the point here is – Metaverse is a non-starter. Billions were sunk into it and it might be ahead of the time, but it’s insane.
I expect it to gather steam for 6G as a potential application. For 5G, unlikely. The cost of the additional hardware is difficult to sustain in the long-term. I am now closely looking at 6G now, by the way. I think that will be a fundamental game-changer. 5G is only an incremental advance.
RadOncNotes 