I recently read the excellent long form article The Metaverse Fever Dream by Pixel Envy (Nick Heer). It gets the general vibe right and I encourage you to read it, but I also think it doesn’t capture what the metaverse — meaning Mark Zuckerberg’s vision strong enough to rename the company after — really was. His vision wasn’t to bring the world together in immersive nirvana. It wasn’t even to sell more ads. The Metaverse existed to let Facebook own a hardware platform.
It's not a secret that I am unimpressed by most VR games. While I am excited about the potential of VR & AR for education and enhancing human cognition, games simply bore me. Or the did. Now I stand corrected. Beat Saber rawks!
I purchased an Oculus Go on launch day, but due to other commitments I wasn't able to play with it until today. These are my initial uncensored thoughts. First off, for 200 bucks it's pretty good. You get a standalone device that boots up and lets you do things. It's preloaded with a few apps, and the catalog features a bunch of free demos, videos, and games. I haven't dug very far into the catalog yet, but so far I'm impressed.