Baseball’s back and I couldn’t care less. What I’m excited about is the world champion Atlanta Braves’ new virtual stadium.
A company called Surreal Events is working with the champs to bring a virtual representation of Truist Park to life via a virtual platform-as-a-service model built in the Unreal engine.
As boring as that sounds, the emergence of an interface-agnostic portal to bespoke metaverses might be what finally convinces the cynical masses that the future is now.
It’s not so much that a digital ballpark exists, it’s what it represents.
Surreal Events invited me to a demo of their browser-based metaverse streaming service where I got hands-on with the platform via good old-fashioned keyboard and mouse.
I’m all-in on metaverse technology, but only because I’m willing to strip away all the dumb crap surrounding the idea and view it for its potential.
The first problem most people have with the metaverse is virtual reality. And it was immediately clear that Surreal’s technology solves that problem.
I love VR. I could spend half an hour grinning at the 3D grid you exist in while a SteamVR experience loads. I’ve reviewed dozens of VR games and experiences and I currently own five different headsets.
That’s why I was shocked to experience VR sickness for the first time a couple years ago. I figured you were either among the small percentage of people who get sick in VR or you weren’t. But, as it turns out, everyone can get VR sickness.
That alone makes it a crappy platform for anything that’s supposed to have wide appeal. If playing Candy Crush or Farmville made a significant portion of the population vomit at random intervals, Facebook/Meta might not be the technology juggernaut it is today.
The fact of the matter is that Meta, Microsoft, and a dozen other companies are trying to position the metaverse as a place where business happens.
And that means there’s a zero-percent chance that the metaverse will succeed in a VR-only format. Luckily, it doesn’t have to.
Instead, just like you can still use Zoom even if you don’t have a webcam, you’ll almost certainly be able to experience most of what the metaverse has to offer without dipping a single toe into virtual reality.