Formed in 2012 and purchased by social media mega-corporation Facebook in 2014, Oculus and its various headsets represented a major leap forward in VR technology developed for personal use. Facebook would further innovate on the technology with the release of the Oculus Quest 2 in 2020, and, the following year, it would revolutionize their use by way of the Metaverse. Ken Kutaragi, the man most responsible for getting Sony into the video game business, doesn’t seem to think VR headsets are here to stay, however.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Kutaragi highlights the importance of real-world connections and pontificates on the longevity of products that jeopardize them. Facebook’s Metaverse—something around which the company recently rebranded—as Kutaragi puts it, is all about placing users in a “quasi-virtual world” in which they are simplified avatars of themselves. Though they may be still connected to names and faces which have meaning in the material world, there’s a disconnect between that and the virtual reality space. Kutaragi compares it to the anonymity afforded to users of internet chat rooms decades ago.

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Kutaragi continues by lamenting the isolation headsets more or less necessitate. Current VR technology and Facebook’s implementation of it may feign a sense of social interaction, but they can only emulate a world of which the user isn’t necessarily an active part. Kutaragi seems to adopt a moral stance against the practice, saying that he “can’t agree with that,” and further adding that he finds VR headsets to be annoying—a sentiment echoed by Niantic's founder in August of 2021.

Facebook Metaverse

That said, Kutaragi isn’t exactly an impartial party; he currently serves as the CEO of Ascent, a robotics company working on tech that has been compared to Star Wars-like holograms—something which Microsoft dabbled with briefly back in 2015. He goes on to state that his primary goal is to make robots capable of “understanding the real world and reaction to things they see for the first time.” In essence, it’s the inverse of VR technology’s apparent goal of putting users inside virtual worlds.

While it isn’t a widely recognized issue in Western countries, Japan’s younger population has for years dealt with issues related to isolationism and societal withdrawal. Known as hikikomori, these recluses may be enabled by things like VR technology and the Metaverse, and the phenomenon touches on Kutaragi’s fears of headsets which isolate their users from the real world.

Beyond that, some critics—including former Oculus CTO John Carmack—have taken issue with the Metaverse’s relationship with NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. Digital creations backed by blockchain technology, there are fears that increased adoption of these tokens may poise serious environmental threats due to increased energy demands and destabilize global economies as a result of their extreme liquidity.

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Source: Bloomberg, Forbes