This is worth negative ten billion dollars. I would pay ten billion dollars to never use this again. I wanted to have hope that we could do this, and it would be fun, but I mean, you guys agree that this one of the most buggy software experiences, ever.

—Alex Heath, The Verge (transcribed audio excerpt from the video below)

I’m still percolating, alas, but I did want to share with my readers a couple of YouTube videos which caught my attention.

The first, a 15-minute editorial video by The Verge‘s Adi Robertson, discusses Meta’s new Quest Pro VR headset and its Horizon Worlds and Horizon Workrooms social VR experiences. She and her colleagues did not hold back in their criticisms of both, particularly the Horizon platforms (the quote at the top of this blogpost comes from another writer for The Verge, as a group was kicking the tires on Horizon Workrooms).

The Verge staff make it very clear that they are less than impressed with what is on offer from Meta, and that they do not believe that remote workteams will be using either the Quest Pro or Horizon Workrooms, over a Zoom call.

The popular virtual reality YouTuber ThrillSeeker goes even further in the following 15-minute video, which has already racked up over 400,000 views:

In it, he takes Mark Zuckerberg and his team at Meta to task for dropping the ball with their virtual reality hardware and software strategy to date:

How in the hell did it go so wrong that Meta and Horizon have become the laughingstock of hundreds of videos and publications, and that Quests, for the most part, are just sitting on shelves collecting dust?

Meta, I understand that you are a massive corporation…and that running a business like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus is probably incredibly difficult.

But you have somehow managed to turn one of the coolest things I have ever seen in my life, into one of the lamest jokes in tech.

—ThrillSeeker

Among many other criticisms, he accuses Meta (rightfully) of focusing on wireless VR headsets to the exclusion of high-end PCVR (that is, headsets like his and my beloved Valve Index, which require a good desktop computer with a powerful graphics card, and can run a lot of applications which wireless headsets would struggle with.

What I find so fascinating about both these videos is that they are emblematic of a rising tide of antipathy against Meta, as it tries to repivot to become a metaverse company, sinking tens of billions of dollars a year into a VR/AR strategy that might take a decade or longer before it goes truly mainstream (that is, beyond the early adopters and the hardcore gamers). Both videos mention the recent massive layoffs at Meta, a further sign that all is not well with the company as it struggles to find the next big thing after social networking.

Mark Zuckerberg is placing a very expensive bet on virtual and augmented reality and the metaverse, but will that big bet pay off, and when? Stay tuned.