Matthew Ball, former global head of strategy at Amazon Studios and author of the 2022 book “The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything,” is re-releasing the book under a new, more underwhelming title: “Building the Spatial Internet.”
To be clear, the book will still be called “The Metaverse,” but the spatial internet bit will replace the former language indicating that the metaverse would revolutionize everything.
Evidently, after two years, the revolution has either come and gone or remains impending. Either way, on July 23, the book’s newest edition launches.
Metaverse hype
Ball sat down with Nilay Patel, the Verge’s editor-in-chief and host of the Decoder podcast. The editor grilled him a bit over the seemingly unrealized hype the metaverse has gotten since Facebook changed its name to an adjective.
In response, Ball pointed out that none of the major players have left the metaverse industry. He maintains that things are still mostly on schedule and that there’s unlikely to be a singular moment when the metaverse and mainstream consumers fall into lockstep.
While the change in tune could indicate a realigning of expectations, Ball may simply be playing the same sort of patient waiting game that Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg evidently is.
After opening the money tap wide for its Reality Labs (formerly Oculus) division, Meta recently tightened its metaverse budget by 20%.
On the surface, these appear to be bearish signs for the burgeoning metaverse. But closer examination reveals little more than the typical prototype, hype, iterate, repeat cycle inherent to the US tech industry.
Artificial intelligence
Prior to the launch of GPT-3, for example, accusations that generative AI was nothing more than hype reached a fever pitch. In the time since, the argument has shifted entirely away from whether chatbots will ever be useful to how long it’ll be before they’re more intelligent than humans.
We could be seeing the same sort of consumer fatigue valley occurring as people get sick of hearing…
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