Posted on 03/20/2026 3:14:59 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
Tech giant Meta has reportedly announced that it is shutting down its metaverse project, which was a dream project of its founder Mark Zuckerberg, who had called it “the next frontier" upon rebranding the social media company from Facebook to Meta in 2021. Four and a half years later and a total outlay of humongous $80 billion, the project has been dumped, making it a failed project.
The shift in Meta’s approach came at a time when generative artificial intelligence (AI) has become the new hotbed for tech companies, with capital expenditure reaching trillions of dollars and a heated race to dominate the market.
Meta announced that Horizon Worlds, its social VR platform, will be removed from Quest headsets entirely by June 15.
What went wrong, and what was the Metaverse project?
Mark Zuckerberg had announced a major strategic shift by rebranding Facebook, which until now had been perceived as a social media company, into Meta, a complete tech company, competing against other giants such as Google and Microsoft.
Meta launched a mega project known as Horizon Worlds in late 2021, aimed at bringing people into a virtual reality.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at news18.com ...
-PJ
Cool. I didn’t realize that I had forgotten all about Metaverse...until now, and it doesn’t even matter.
The reason why it didnt work is because people don’t want to wear stupid glasses and have images beamed onto the lens.
A better advancement would have been the ability to convert rooms that you stand inside glfor your immersion environment.
The characters were little more than clunky cartoon Sims. The whole execution was amateurish and the result was goofy.
“The whole execution was amateurish and the result was goofy.”
So it had a heavy curry smell to it.
This tells me that Zuk didn’t get rich because he was smart, he got rich because he was lucky. At least he was smart enough to kill this program.
S/B Metadverse
It was stockholder money. They are ones who require explanation. The rest of us? Nah, not so much.
I wouldn’t assume it’s gone for good. Maybe Zuck is pulling back on one bit of overreach, but Quest headsets are still for sale and other gaming companies are experimenting with VR display systems. Some gamers will like the fully immersive 3-D displays. My guess is that the bigger potential would be to allow gamers to cut the cord to a big gaming monitor and take the game anywhere they could get a wifi connection back to their gaming computer or to a game being run in the cloud.
Eventually the gaming computer will be the size of a smartphone. Then maybe it will be a chip. The Elon Musks of the world already want people to embed chips in their brains for other purposes. I imagine it’s only a matter of time until a democrat president mandates chips to seamlessly integrate all medical records and real time physical and neurological monitoring into the fedgov medical nirvanna computer.
The question then becomes what kind of content will be run on these systems and the extent to which people will interface socially on these devices. They’ll still need an audio connection to chat or give prompts and some kind of controller.
“So it had a heavy curry smell to it.”
I see what you did there. Nice quip.
He doesn’t appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed.
I had seen this previously, but thanks for the reminder.
About 5 years ago, a colleague had tried to convince our board to buy Metaverse “property” (yes, that was a thing). It wasn’t much - keep in mind, large company - maybe 10k IIRC. But it was supposed to be like a virtual “storefront”.
Now, I’m no technical trog - I’ve embraced SaaS, AI, clouds, et al.
However, this just sounded stupid and I hate wasting money. I don’t mind spending on POCs that don’t work out - sometimes that’s worthwhile, but this looked like a complete waste.
I won the argument. Said colleague wasn’t too peeved, but said “I hope you’re right and we aren’t forced to buy at a much higher price point.”
I now need to send him a note “Told you so”
I had been royally impressed with the way NASA brought Apollo 13 back from the moon in early 1970. That’s where the oxygen tank on the command module blew out on the way to the moon. There was not enough oxygen on the module for the crew to survive the way back. There was enough for the trip if they stayed connected to the lunar landing module. This required a rocket burn on the back side of the moon with no radio connection to earth. NASA had never done the math for the correct orientation or time for this burn with the lunar module attached. To do this, they requested time on all the private IBM 350 computers in the US. Our group in GM agreed to participate. The calculations were completed (a single smart watch now has more computing power than all the IBM 360s in the US of the time) and the crew came back. They had to make an oxygen supply tube from the lander to the module out of socks. They arrived safely back, and I and most of the other people in the US were able to watch the splash down on TV
But he sure thinks he is.
I remember, but the segue from Zuckerberg to this comment?
I wonder if anyone was “let go” because of the failure of this?
That company has too much money if they can just ho-hum such a loss.
Any chance that Zuckerberg will be fired?
If I stole a pencil at work I would be fired.
Yes, thats about it. My toon could go visit your toon at your digital house. We could go to the digital shoe store and buy digital shoes for each other using real money. It really was sort a primitive attempt to create the Matrix universe except that we needed to stay awake enough to spend real money.
His money came from the CIA. It was a DARPA project called Lifelog. In its original version, we were all supposed to wear cameras and download it so that others could see our life from our perspective. Of course that would document everything for government but “people that worry about that must have something to hide”.
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