Weekly Metaverse 129: The Quest Pro is all business
Plus, an NBA turns his TikTok over to his digital persona
Good morning! I know I said I’d be off while I’m in Seoul (which I highly, highly recommend based on my few days here so far), but here I am writing a newsletter anyway. My wife and I have walked a lot of miles in the last couple of days and are exhausted, so we’re resting for the morning. And resting for me turns out to involve reading news, and it turns out there happens to be a bunch of metaverse-related news. So, newsletter. But first, here’s a giant LED billboard on the side of a building here that shows videos of puppies:
Anyway, the big news that you’ve probably already heard is that Meta announced the Quest Pro at the premium price point of $1500. That naturally gave people a fair bit of sticker shock, given that it’s triple the recently-raised price of the most expensive version of the Quest 2.
It’s important to remember, though, that this isn’t the Quest 3 - expect that to come next year. The Quest Pro is designed for business users, as very clearly evidenced by the fact that Satya Nadella joined the launch announcement to tout Microsoft’s partnership with Meta to bring Teams, SharePoint, Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Outlook to Quest - not exactly Beatsaber and Bonelab.
The Microsoft partnership is interesting, given that they’ve got a directly competitive product in HoloLens. That said, it follows their usual strategy of making sure their Office apps are available everywhere in order to maintain dominance in the enterprise software market, just as they’ve done with iOS and Android, even back in the days when they thought a Microsoft phone would be a winner.
Anyway, back to the $1500 price point - the reality is that because this is designed as an enterprise tool, you’re probably not buying it; your company is. If it improves productivity by 10% for a remote employee, then it’s an absolute no-brainer. If it improves the remote experience enough that roles can be shifted from in-office to remote, the savings on office-related costs will clearly be at least an order of magnitude greater than $1500.
That, of course, leaves the question of whether VR is a real productivity tool or a novelty. Ironically, if you ask the folks at Meta, it may well be the former - they reportedly don’t think particularly highly of Meta’s flagship VR software product, Horizon Worlds, and aren’t spending a great deal of time in VR at work. That said, I don’t actually know if they had access to Quest Pro headsets or if they were working on Quest 2s, which are tough to spend a lot of time in due to their weight. Either way, though, the reality may just be that Meta’s forte in the VR space is proving to be hardware, not software. Nothing wrong with that - just look at Apple and the iPhone; they established hardware dominance and only years later started seeing significant revenue from the services portion of their business.
Even if Horizon Worlds sucks, third-party apps like Immersed, which gives you as many monitors as you want, can still be incredibly useful. Also, a lot of the focus on the Quest Pro seems to be on AR, not VR, which makes sense given that VR is going to serve a much more limited business audience - primarily remote workers - while AR is useful for more or less everyone if it’s done right. People aren’t going to want to put on a headset and get into Horizon Worlds to meet with coworkers who are sitting next to them in a conference room (even if it’s helpful for the one person joining the meeting remotely). Using AR to see a 3D model of a product in the middle of the table, though, is absolutely something that’s going to be useful.
With all that said, the difference between Meta’s Quest Pro and the iPhone is that the iPhone was creating a new category, while Quest Pro isn’t - even if you carve out enterprise AR as its own category, HoloLens and Magic Leap have been around for years. Of course, they haven’t exactly made enormous inroads into the use case of every day remote office workers, and that’s the real prize to be had.
The real question for me, then, is how Apple’s headset will stack up. You have to imagine it’ll be an excellent product, and I think they’ll actually benefit quite a bit from the fact that Facebook announced first at this price point. People are looking $1500 and thinking it’s a huge number because their anchor point is the few hundred dollars that the Quest 2 costs. When Apple’s headset comes out, even if it’s $2000, that won’t seem so extreme since the anchor point has now been set at $1500.
So for the medium-term future, I’ll be waiting and watching. How will the adoption of the Quest Pro go, how will Apple’s headset stack up, and will Apple be able to use their existing enterprise relationships as an advantage over Meta when it comes to distribution? Whatever the answers, by the end of 2023 we should certainly have a good idea of who the leader in the space will be.
Identity in the Metaverse
A couple of fun stories this week - first, Luka Doncic has launched a digital alter ego of himself. (For those of you who aren’t familiar, he’s an NBA player.) I think there are two interesting things about this, the first of which is just how good that avatar looks.
But what’s really intriguing here is that this isn’t just an avatar - it’s an AI persona of Luka, which is currently posting on his TikTok. It’s unclear exactly how much of the videos are AI vs. directed/designed by a human, and a lot of them are just him duetting with other videos and rating them, which certainly isn’t anything wildly complex. Still, that’s one of the advantages to being an early adopter of this sort of thing - even if the content doesn’t turn out to be wildly compelling, you get points for novelty regardless.
As AI improves, the potential for digital personas like this will be really interesting, especially for public figures like Luka. We see lots of companies launching products in the metaverse, and if Kia’s unveiling a new car or Nike’s running a promotion in Decentraland, they could pay to hire digital Luka to be a part of it. He doesn’t have to spend the time to be there, but if the AI’s a good enough representation, that’s just fine. Eventually digital personas may just be natural offshoots of personal brands. Once we’re all regularly meeting up socially in the metaverse, hopefully I can send my own persona to the stuff that I don’t want to attend - he can listen to the family arguments at Thanksgiving while I watch football.
The second identity story of the week is that Meta is planning to enable interoperability of avatars between Horizon Worlds and Crayta, which is a metaverse platform that Meta acquired last year. First, let me just be clear that this isn’t wildly compelling, particularly since Horizon Worlds is pretty meh and Meta’s just integrating two platforms that they own.
Still, I’m going to put my optimistic hat on and hope that this is a positive sign of Meta continuing to stick to its commitment to interoperability. As avatars because a key piece of identity in the metaverse, it’s going to be fundamentally important to be able to move them from one platform to another. What I’d really love to see is an announcement of interoperability with Decentraland or Roblox or some other major metaverse name - we’ll see if that ever happens.
Tweets About the Metaverse
As usual, Twitter is full of fun metaverse stuff!
Will people be regularly strapping AR headsets on in the near future? Nope, they most certainly will not. Still, this does feel like a glimpse into the future - at some point we’ll have AR glasses in the form factor of regular glasses, and then riding them while riding a bike will be far too common to be Tweet-worthy.
This is a follow up to an earlier Tweet we talked about with AI designing a Chinese restaurant skyscraper, but this one’s perhaps a bit more practical design-wise. For me, the question is how long until this becomes a real tool - tell an AI to design a building like we can now tell AI to create an image. First it’ll work for digital buildings in the metaverse, but it’s easy to imagine that AI will soon be able to spit out architectural drawings for real-world buildings with all of the necessary engineering calculations done.
And speaking of designing buildings, how about a bit of interior design? It seems as though we’re not far off from being able to use mixed reality and AI to seamlessly modify our surroundings to make the world look just as we want.
One Last Thing
Provided without commentary: