Behind the flop of the metaverse, the success of virtual reality

A little while ago, talking about metavers was no longer trendy. Since the Facebook group gave the “la” by renaming itself Meta Platforms in October 2021, we started dreaming of making a new life or having another one with his avatar in a new immersive world, virtual reality headset riveted on the head. The next world was going to be virtual.

But, on the Internet planet, one new fashion is quickly chasing the other. Web3, blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFT, metaverse … all have recently been capped at the pole by an artificial intelligence (AI) answering to the name of ChatGPT. Launched at the end of November 2022 by the American start-up OpenAI, this conversational robot has paved the way for other AI, so-called generative text (Bard from Google, LLaMA from Meta, My AI from Snapchat, etc.), images (DALL-E 2 from OpenAI, Stability AI from Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc.), or music (like Flow Machines from Sony).

Did creative AI kill the metaverse? Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI to put “ChatGPT” in its Bing search engine. “I am very impressed by the rate of improvement of these intelligences. I think they will have a huge impact, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates predicted in January. I don’t think Web3 is that important or that metaverse alone is revolutionary, but AI is quite revolutionary. »

The sirens of the “chatbots”

Investors are now attracted by the sirens of these creator chatbots. “From time to time, a universe arrives and causes an explosion of new companies. We saw this with the Internet, then with mobile. AI could be the next platform. Some categories are experiencing a contraction in their valuation and sources of financing, but not generative AI,” Shernaz Daver, partner at the venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, told Agence France-Presse.

The metaverse and its procession of virtual universes and augmented realities have not yet said their last word. Pekka Lundmark, CEO of the Finnish telecommunications equipment manufacturer Nokia, even sees them as nerdy smartphones. “6G and the metaverse could make smartphones a thing of the past, he predicts. Augmented and virtual reality glasses will become a more commonly used interface in 2030. People will also have devices directly implanted in the body. »

Read also the interview: Article reserved for our Meta subscribers: “We are convinced that the metaverse is the future of computing”

More skeptical, the father of Sony’s PlayStation (PS) game console, Ken Kutaragi (former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment), does not believe in fully immersive worlds: “The metaverse consists of doing quasi-real in the virtual world, and I don’t see the point of doing it. Technology should merge the real and the cyber rather than separating them. “Now Sony Interactive Entertainment, the subsidiary of the Japanese giant is betting big on its new PS VR 2 headset (for the PS5 console).

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