When did Gartner predict each phase for the meh-ta-verse Gartner-Cycle, and is there a Gartner-Cycle for Gartner-Cycles?

-> Icon, Where's the key to my Gartner-Cycle Cyclotron?

The Gartner Cycle

1. A functional description for report-for-money production when you need to address hype, grief or manipulation.

2. The green environmental maintainer on a two-wheeled vehicle with a lawnmower attached to keep opinions levelled.

Yeah, I paid $ 50,000 to Gartner two years ago for "VR's going to be big, really big" report and bet the company on it. Can I have my money back?

Often it's difficult to predict whether a product will be successful but VR has been trying for around 50 years to convince. There are, no doubt, some extremely useful applications that use "VR" for remote work: surgery, engineering, nuclear power stations,… But none of these come with the trappings of the "Matrix on the cheap" that keeps getting peddled. I think that one of the problems is that pundits fail to take into account the importance of our imagination. This is crucial even when playing the most immersive game, but it also provides a barrier between the real world and the fantasy we're indulging in, which a full VR-world has yet failed to overcome. I guess porn might be the way to go but that's a much more physical than visual experience; think the Orgasmatron from The Sleeper.

"Businesses are not rushing to adopt the metaverse, according to analyst firm Gartner – because it's just not very good or useful."

In other news, water is wet.

I join teams calls every day and literally no one even bothers to turn on their camera. Why would they go to the effort of strapping on a heavy, expensive headset? Apart from a few niche use cases, this is just not something people are going to want.

> Why would they go to the effort of strapping on a heavy, expensive headset?

Why would they go spending a lot of money on that useless, heavy, expensive headset? It starts there!

Somehow VR advocates conveniently forget the huge investment required for it to run (headset/glove, computer able to run it, enough space to move in), compared with the benefits of using VR in the first place. What is that benefit anyway? It had been an esthetic choice if the virtual universe was something stunning like you see in the movies ("Player One" style), but we aren't there yet. Right now there are lots of cons and no pros.

Not very good, and not of any use indeed. Try again in 10 years.

Is anyone surprised that this Second Life in VR failed?

> Virtual reality (VR) use cases in non-gaming environments are failing to live up to customer expectations for scale

What use cases? What expectations? Please show me someone whos first thought in the morning is: "Oh boy, I cannot wait until I can look at my spreadsheets floating as giant panes in front of me in my living room!". Or someone who always dreamt of the day when he could respond to business mails using hand gestures and keyboards he has to look at while typing at a whooping 1-2 characters per minute.

> Immersive meetings using avatars are not yet compelling enough

And never will be, unless someone can explain very clearly what additional value these are supposed to provide. I don't give a damn about the quality of the avatars. We are in meetings to exchange information. That's why, during the pandemic, remote meetings took off and never came back down again: The verbal information + whatever presentation or screensharing someone is streaming, is the reason why meetings are held in the first place. This is what we are in meetings for.

What additional value does a virtual environment add to this? What additional value does surround sound add to this? What information can I not get unless someone has a 3D avatar to block my view of the presentation material with? Unless the virtual environment is itself the presentation medium (eg. engineering projects, architecture) required to adequately represent the data narrated and discussed, what do I get out of having such an environment?

If I am supposed to pay thousands of dollars on equipment and wear a bulky headset during meetings, I want a good reason why. I want to know what I get for my investment. And if the answer is "something something avatar something" then I'm not gonna be a customer.

I do think there's something to be said for a true virtual desktop. Imagine being able to open any number of windows and just placing them in mid-air. Imagine being able to view an entire manpage as just a ten foot high floating window. I think that would be pretty fun and possibly even more productive. It's just that this literally isn't even on offer.

None of the metaverses are "a metaverse". It's not a physical space that programs can project into, it's a closed platform with highly limited support. VR for office work desperately needs to get away from the idea of "an app" as something that drives the display and towards an app as something that places objects with affordances into a space.

Also, gatekeeping. It has to stop. A good driver is "Imagine a person going through a workday. Every single action and interaction must be VR native." There are two options:

1. Implement literally everything yourself. Email, calendar, social, chat integration, terminals, editors, spreadsheets, browsers, file sharing, alerts, etc., all VR native.

2. Offer an open API that anyone can hook an app into. This is the right one. For the love of God, Facebook, success *first*, then capture audience! A captive space without users is not worth anything. This will require commitments that lower your revenue. You need to understand that lowering long-term revenue is a preferable option to having no revenue because your whole offering is dead on arrival. You *need* to get the enthusiasts on board.

Finally, it's VR ffs. Offer something better than reality! If every app you showcase doesn't have at least one "wow" moment, and I mean something that *actually* gets audiences to say "wow" audibly out loud, you are doing it wrong. It's a freely configurable virtual space! This should not be hard! Look at HL Alyx, that had a wow moment literally as the first thing when you enter the game.

> Imagine being able to open any number of windows

I can already do that. I can even search them by app name, and in case of my terminals and browsertabs, by current content.

> and just placing them in mid-air.

I don't want to look around to find a window. I want to jump to it and have it appear in front of my. My desktop environment and my terminal setups allow me to do exactly that with a few keystrokes.

Again I am gonna ask the question: "What advantage in capability or efficiency am I getting from this?"

> Imagine being able to view an entire manpage as just a ten foot high floating window.

What for? Unless I develop serious superpowers, I can still read only one line at a time. And in any case, usually the first thing I do after opening a manpage is to press / and search for what I am looking for.

> I think that would be pretty fun

Having experimented with VR work environments in the past, I can confirm that it is. But that is a novelty effect, and it wears of very quickly.

> and possibly even more productive.

For the reasons outlined above, it isn't. At least in my context, which is software development, I haven't seen a single use case, where VR confers a tangible advantage over using my collection of UHD screens, precision pointing device and mechanical keyboard.

Actually good AR would be a different matter. A small device, possibly a monocle or slim glasses, that connects to my phone for its compute, storage and uplink, has long battery life and can be used for things like navigation, or better yet INTEGRATE with my existing work environment, would be great. I am talking about a device that I can just wear like normal glasses, all day, without discomfort.

But instead of offering that, all I see are expensive giant headsets with a battery life measured in a few hours, if that long, that somehow want to replace my work environment with less efficient "solutions", that I neither asked for or need.

We tend to focus within a cone. So a 2ft square display 2 feet away works - so to see a 10 ft high "window".. I would need to be 10 ft away and would need a bigger font size, and thus get the same quantity of information (if the VR technology was up to it)

"pretty fun and possibly even more productive"

I'm not sure I agree. Man pages are just fine and if I want them to look 10 foot high I can zoom in. This can't be "possibly even more productive", it would have to be vastly more productive for me to change the way I work.

Perhaps if it could hover the names of my colleagues in meetings and exactly what they do, as I struggle to remember people's names (after 25+ years contracting, I've worked with many thousands of people - buffer overflow?).

The problem is the people leading this charge (Mark Zuckerberg) lack imagination, and think we all want to turn up at meetings looking like a virtual squirrel or something. No one wants that. Perhaps just a slightly better looking, and less tired and dishevelled version of myself might be appealing? ;-)

I guess for information visualisation, if you could fly through a 3D graph to pick out data points? (I'm stretching reality here, I don't even believe what I'm writing - but I guess there are people in the world who would find this helpful!? - Maybe?)

If Facebook can't succeed after throwing 10s of $billions at it, then I guess it's just not ready for the mainstream yet (apart from _perhaps_ for gaming)

I often shut my eyes during a conference call to focus on what is being said - and how it is being said. So the quality of the avatars does not matter.

> I don't give a damn about the quality of the avatars.

Only if the avatars are of scantily-clad, muscular barbarians (compulsory chain mail bikini for the ladies, loincloth for the gents)!

And at the 60 minutes mark the program injects a dozen hungry saber-tooth tigers, to keep meetings short.

Re: What use cases? What expectations? Please show me someone whos first thought in the morning is: "Oh boy, I cannot wait until I can look at my spreadsheets floating as giant panes in front of me in my living room!". Or someone who always dreamt of the day when he could respond to business mails using hand gestures and keyboards he has to look at while typing at a whooping 1-2 characters per minute.

The only real use cases I can see are if, for some reason, a video call isn't suitable and you need to meet "face to face" but a real, in person, meeting is either not possible (perhaps another lockdown) or not feasible (perhaps you are in another country). And, TBH, despite struggling, I've failed to come up with a reason why video calling would not be suitable, and meeting via VR would.

Don't get me wrong: I'm on my second Quest (went from Quest 1 to Quest 2), and I *love* VR for gaming. I also want to see it make inroads into other areas, but I've yet to see a compelling case for it in business.

AR is another matter. Correctly implemented, that could be good for business. For instance, a field service engineer could have a set of AR googles containing maintenance instructions for the the (say) different makes and models of boilers your company support, and when they encounter a boiler they aren't familiar with, they could bring up a virtual manual (or even 3d model) of the boiler next to the real thing.. OK, they could have the manuals in the van, or know a few models, but the AR headset could contain details for thousands of models.

See icon ------->

Apparently people pay them to generate this crap stuff - therefore, I guess, their report must have some value... even if its basically a complicated awk (or convoluted ChatGPT prompt) of reddit posts from grizzled IT chaps.

This report having (notional) value is, of course, possibly a first for Gartner.

Yeah, I'm so used to Gartner's reports being so spectacularly off-target that I'm now seriously worried that VR and metaverses must be just around the corner.

I frequently get together with around a dozen folks with a shared interest via Zoom. Can't imagine doing this as avatars in a metaverse. Aside from the additional costs of hardware it sounds like a second rate and nausea inducing experience. Much better to see people's faces that I recognise and can see the facial expressions of rather than some cartoonish avatar with weird out of sync facial expressions.

"cartoonish avatar with weird out of sync facial expressions"

You have to realise that, from Meta's persepective, their reference point is Zuckerberg in real life.

If one really wants immersive meetings, one can meet in too small, hardly ventillated, cramped meeting rooms and get the full range of blah. sweat and farts from all the participants.

VR can't beat that experience.

If I want less immersion, I join online and seclude myself to where ever I currently am.

VR can't beat that experience, either.

So, what's exactly the use case?

The use case is "you give us your money, after having already spent a lot of money buying equipment which will be obsolete in 3, in 2...".

The hype cycle has already moved on to XML , the blockchain , web3 , metaverse , LLMs. If you don't have an ultra confident bullshitter integrated in your tech stack you've already lost.

Mark my words, 2024 is the year of Quantum Computing. I'm already moving to [1]Paris .

[1] https://sifted.eu/articles/france-quantum-computing-investment

Brookes, he of TMMM, also published a book "The design of design". Part of this was recounted his university research group's work on this years ago. They discovered something very similar - its appeal to users was limited. IIRC users were much less keen on being able to walk round inside a VR model of whatever they were designing compared to having an image of it in front of them that could be rotated or walked through, something for which an ordinary screen would suffice.