Facebook's entry into the Metaverse has been quite easy to laugh at from the outside, but there's a reason why the social media giant is willing to lose the $46,000,000,000 they've put into the digital world.
Virtual reality has been a thing for a long while, but up until 2021 it was largely confined to gaming.
You could interpret multiplayer worlds like World of Warcraft or even Fortnite and Roblox as '2D' metaverses where players use digital avatars to interact with friends and randoms across the world, but 2021 saw a major shift into what is now known as the metaverse after Facebook's strong investment.
Mark Zuckerberg's social media platform officially rebranded it's parent company to 'Meta', announcing alongside this an initial $10 billion investment into the metaverse - but this began far earlier with Facebook's purchase of VR headset manufacturer Oculus for $2 billion in 2014.
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What we then saw was a massive push - not just from Meta but from wider Fortune 500 companies - towards the metaverse, with full realized digital worlds where people could meet up with their friends, do some shopping, and even go to work.
People were even going so far to buy property in the metaverse, and popular worlds like The Sandbox, Decentraland, and Meta's own Horizon Worlds offers people virtual realities to live their 'second life' within.
It didn't exactly catch on though, with VR headsets proving a difficult sell to non-enthusiast audiences, and unfortunate viral images of Mark Zuckerberg in Horizon Worlds didn't exactly sell people on the platform's ability to mimic real life.
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Reports by Fortune have estimated that Meta have now sunk upwards of $46.5 billion on the Metaverse despite dramatically low player numbers, but there's still a belief that the investment could work out in the end.
At the core, Zuckerberg still wholly believes that the metaverse is the next primary digital function that people will move onto, and positioning themselves as the de facto hardware resource would allow Meta to conquer a market that they haven't yet been able to tackle.
They want to be ahead of the curve, and most importantly in control of the market before it becomes the norm, and predicting virtual reality and the metaverse as the next big thing is a risk that Meta is willing to take on.
Even Apple has made their own investment into the virtual reality space with the Vision Pro - which leans more on the augmented reality aspects than the digital world - but that has struggled to reach sales targets according to Gizmodo.
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CNBC's report on Meta's investment into the metaverse has encapsulated social media's almost overwhelming response to moving into the digital world, with countless YouTube comments disavowing what some believe to be the next evolution of tech.
"I have 0 interest in spending time in the metaverse," outlines one user, whereas another points out that "those are the same guys who won't let their staff work remotely, yet expect you to live 100% of your life in their metaverse."
Another commenter details the impracticalities of entering the metaverse from a physical perspective too, arguing that "no one wants to wear that heavy headset all day for a low quality virtual experience."
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It certainly doesn't seem to be catching on at the moment, but there's still a belief from some at the top that people will come around eventually. Otherwise it'll simply continue to burn a hole in the pocket of one of the richest companies in the world.