Meta, Facebook’s parent company, recently unveiled its latest innovation, the Meta Orion Glasses Control, the company’s first True Augmented Reality Glasses, during a flashy event led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The demo that caught Linger’s eye was the Orion demo not because of the technical brilliance of the glasses but because they looked cool.
One could easily envision using them without that uncomfortable feeling a lot of these AR products fail to hide, this is the claimed control Meta wants to exert in AR. Augmented Reality (AR) wearables could finally be headed for the mainstream and a good number of reasons will justify the optimism. A couple of decades back, PCs and browsers opened the gates for W1 and the dot-com bust.
Next came smartphones and mobile apps, ushering in Web2 and the rise of the social web. Now, AR/VR, combined with digital wallets that simplify managing personal data and digital assets, could be our entry point into Web3, the next phase of the internet. Meta Orion Glasses control access to the Metaverse, an immersive, shared online world.
Thirdly, they improve mobility, including for persons with restricted mobility, and provide new methods of tracking and promoting health and wellness. As per Zuckerberg, mobile phones could be replaced by wearable glasses before the end of this decade. He also sees Facebook’s wearables as a path to the company’s own Metaverse.
While he’s placing big bets to get there. Of course, Facebook’s Reality Labs, the branch working on the advancement of its VR/AR, is still dedicated to this goal. However, for the last quarter, it faced bitter deterioration: the division incurred a loss of 4.5 billion US dollars.
To quote Zuckerberg directly, The Metaverse isn’t something a company builds. In truth, it is the next phase of the internet. What seems to now be compensating for his long-term strategy with stocks is something that was once penalizing his excesses on wearables and Metaverse pursuits.
Today, for instance, Facebook’s stock has reached an important milestone and Zuckerberg currently has an estimated worth of more than $200 billion. But this raises important questions: This chart only reveals that we are effectively relying on companies.
Such as Facebook to set the standards and the technology that will be used to deliver the next version of the web to us. Facebook’s business model is a walled garden, allowing itself to take our data and sell it while locking us into the ecosystem that takes all our rights and freedom for their profits. It’s Web2 all over again.
These rights, enshrined in the law of countries such as Canada and the USA, include the right to property, the right to privacy as well as freedom to exercise commerce legally. So why shouldn’t these rights extend to online and virtual spaces, especially with innovations like Meta Orion Glasses that could exert control over our digital experiences?
In an Open Metaverse, a decentralized network of virtual worlds and environments users could freely buy, sell, and transfer digital goods across platforms without the fear of losing them if a company shuts down or changes its terms of service. This would address one of the hidden risks of centralized control.
Arianna Simpson of Andreessen Horowitz points out a key issue in today’s digital economy: the lack of digital property rights. You don’t have ownership; there are no property rights. They exist inside someone else’s universe at their privilege, she argues.
One group working to address this is OMA3, a coalition of nearly 100 Web3 companies, including Animoca Brands, led by Yat Siu. OMA3 is dedicated to building a decentralized, interoperable metaverse. Their mission is to ensure the metaverse isn’t dominated by a few large corporations.
But instead becomes an open ecosystem where users fully control their data, identities, and digital assets. The alliance is focused on developing shared protocols and standards that will allow different metaverse environments to connect seamlessly. This interoperability is key to the future of the metaverse, especially as we consider how tools like Meta Orion Glasses control our digital experiences.
In an open metaverse, as Alfred Tom, Executive Director of OMA3, explains, users could transfer their digital assets whether it’s a virtual plot of land, an avatar, or a piece of art across different virtual worlds, preserving both value and functionality.
