A virtual version of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg jumped up and down to “celebrate” that legs will soon be visible in his self-created virtual world. To the uninitiated, it seemed like a minor thing, but it was a milestone for Zuckerberg’s dreamed virtual world, the metaverse. So far, only upper bodies could be seen in it.

The moment was featured as a milestone in a presentation by Meta (formerly Facebook). In retrospect, it turned out that it only took a film trick to make the “legs film”. It turned out: Zuckerberg’s future vision on the Internet is still a virtual construction site.

A year ago there was a lot of talk about the Metaverse. Meta CEO Zuckerberg was fed up with Google and Apple’s dominance of smartphones and hoped to change that with his own next version of the internet. He even changed his company’s name from Facebook to Meta just a year ago.

Even before the name change came, Facebook announced a major investment. Over the next five years, 10,000 people would be hired in the EU to work on the Metaverse. A year later, the NOS company does not want to say how many people have been hired so far. It gives the impression that the project has hardly got off the ground or not at all.

Internet of the 80s

“You have to think of the Metaverse like the Internet in the 80s: the actual applications are still being developed,” says Alex van der Baan, CEO of YOM (Your Open Metaverse). His fifteen-person start-up aims to build video infrastructure—think YouTube—for the metaverse.

“We also ask ourselves: are we on the right path. Finally we got on a moving train. At the same time, Van der Baan says he doesn’t know what his product will look like in a few years. “It’s going so fast, we’ve changed so many times in the last two years.”

Last week, Meta introduced a $1500 headset aimed at the business market so office workers can meet in a virtual work environment:

It’s clear that interest in the Metaverse is high. According to consulting firm McKinsey, more than $120 billion was invested in Metaverse technology and infrastructure in the first five months of this year. This is a doubling compared to the whole of 2021.

Virtual reality researcher Mirjam Vosmeer of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences points out that given these significant investments, tech companies expect to get their money back soon. “I’m shocked by the enormous amounts of money they are willing to spend on it. We have to realize that it’s not just about beautiful innovations.”

For now, the Metaverse is a grand voyage of discovery with many unanswered questions. Is it too early to look into this? No, says researcher Zerrin Yumak from Utrecht University. “The public debate started last year, but the research has been going on for decades.”

She believes the Metaverse is coming. There is only a big question mark hanging over the form. For example, will the telephone remain the most important input or will virtual reality and augmented reality become really big? “I can’t imagine people wearing VR glasses for hours in the coming years,” predicts Yumak.

Billions of dollars and technical problems

Anyway, Meta wants to move forward in the Metaverse. The company spent about $16 billion on it in a year and a half. The software of the virtual world is now full of errors, wrote the New York Times, among others. And, painfully enough, our own employees don’t feel like using it themselves.

Finally, Zuckerberg looks suspiciously at Apple. The iPhone maker is expected to release a competing headset in the not too distant future, possibly early next year. Also, Apple has deeper pockets than Meta, which adds another headache to all of this: competition with TikTok.