Battle of the Metaverse Philosophies

‘I’m really not sure the average person can tell you what the Metaverse is’ – Tim Cook, CEO of Apple told the Dutch Publication Bright last week. 

Until today, no study has been released showing more then 10-15% of the respondents able to explain the Metaverse to someone else. Cook adds that he prefers to use AR/VR terminology as he thinks “it’s important that the average person understand what something is”. Wasn’t this the case with these technologies too few years back? To a certain extend, it’s even easier today as we can dig into libraries of AR/VR experiences from our development history and show concrete examples to help explain – as precisely as possible – the enigmatic Metaverse. 

But that’s not it.

If we read between the lines, the Metaverse is tightly linked to META, Apple’s main competitor in the battle of the future of the Internet. In Cook’s vision, the 3-dimensional internet moves along with augmented reality. They believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating the results into their Apple existing ecosystem, they will build a better consumer experience. On the other end, Mark Zuckerberg believes in a much larger ecosystem to exist thanks to the specialization across different companies – basically any company with the right skillset can contribute to build the Metaverse. 

Two different philosophies, targeting the same market and aiming to take their hardware mainstream. Apple’s first headset is set to be launched sometime in 2023 at a speculative price of 3000$. If this turns out to be true, the average person may pass on this one…