Is the Metaverse useful and how to use it for business
Contents
<p>In October 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta and bet the company on a word most people couldn’t define. Reality Labs, the division building that bet, has since become one of the most expensive experiments in corporate history — losing $13.7 billion in 2022, $16.1 billion in 2023, and $17.7 billion in 2024, and climbing. That is not a rounding error; that is the GDP of a small country, spent annually, on a thing your business is now being told it must have a strategy for.</p>
<p>So let me offer the sceptic’s version, because the breathless one is everywhere already. I self-host most of my own tools and I’m allergic to being sold a platform, which makes me exactly the wrong audience for metaverse marketing and, I’d argue, exactly the right person to ask whether any of it is actually useful. Some of it is. Most of it, for most businesses, is expensive theatre. Here’s how to tell which is which.</p>
<h2 id="what-the-metaverse-actually-is-and-isnt">What the “metaverse” actually is (and isn’t)</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Strip away the marketing and there is no single thing called <em>the</em> metaverse. There is a bundle of real technologies — VR headsets, AR overlays, persistent 3D spaces, spatial audio — and a marketing narrative that these will fuse into one shared, persistent, interoperable virtual world. The technologies are real and improving. The unified world is, for now, aspirational: today’s “metaverses” are walled gardens that don’t talk to each other, which is roughly where the web was before hyperlinks. Meta’s Horizon doesn’t connect to anyone else’s platform, and there’s no shared standard forcing it to.</p>
<p>The useful mental model is not “a new internet”. It’s “video calls, but you can share a 3D space”. That’s a much smaller, much more honest claim, and it’s the frame that tells you where the technology earns its keep and where it doesn’t. If a task is genuinely improved by feeling like you’re standing next to someone in a room that doesn’t exist, VR helps. If it isn’t, you’re paying for headsets to do a job a Zoom call already does better.</p>
<p>It’s also worth separating two technologies the marketing deliberately blurs together. <strong>VR</strong> (virtual reality) replaces your view entirely — you’re inside a fully synthetic space, and you can’t see the real room. <strong>AR</strong> (augmented reality) overlays digital content onto the real world you can still see. These have almost nothing in common as business tools despite being sold under one umbrella. AR’s killer use — a technician seeing repair instructions overlaid on the actual machine in front of them, hands free — is genuinely valuable <em>because</em> it keeps you in reality. VR’s value comes from the opposite: total immersion for training or design where the real world would be a distraction or a hazard. Conflating them is how you end up buying the wrong hardware for your problem. Decide which one your use case actually needs before anyone shows you a demo, because the demo will always be gorgeous and always be selling.</p>
<h2 id="the-handful-of-cases-where-it-genuinely-pays-off">The handful of cases where it genuinely pays off</h2>
<p>I’m not a blanket cynic here — there are real, defensible uses, and they cluster around one property: <strong>spatial presence</strong>. When the value of the interaction comes from being <em>in a space</em> rather than just <em>seeing a face</em>, VR does something a flat video call can’t.</p>
<p><strong>Training for physical, high-stakes, or expensive-to-rehearse tasks.</strong> This is the strongest case by a distance. Surgeons rehearsing a procedure, warehouse staff learning a picking route, technicians practising on equipment that costs a fortune or is dangerous to get wrong — VR lets people build muscle memory without the real-world cost of failure. Walmart, Boeing, and several medical schools have run programmes here with measurable results, because the alternative (real equipment, real risk, real downtime) is genuinely more expensive.</p>
<p>The economics here are unusually clean, which is why these programmes survive when the flashier ones get quietly cancelled. If training on the real thing means taking a production line offline, flying instructors to a site, or risking damage to hardware worth six figures, then a headset and a simulation that a hundred trainees can run repeatedly is straightforwardly cheaper. The value isn’t the novelty of VR; it’s that you’ve replaced a scarce, expensive, dangerous physical resource with software. That’s a real substitution with a real number attached, and it’s the pattern to look for. When someone pitches you a VR project, the first question is always: what expensive or dangerous real-world thing does this let us stop doing? If there’s a clear answer, keep listening. If the answer is “well, it’s more engaging”, you’re being sold theatre.</p>
<p><strong>Design review of physical objects and spaces.</strong> Architects walking clients through a building before it’s built, car designers evaluating a full-scale model without milling one, factory planners checking sight-lines on a line that doesn’t exist yet. Reviewing a 3D thing in 3D beats reviewing it as a rendering on a monitor, and the saving — a design flaw caught before it’s poured in concrete — is large and concrete.</p>
<p><strong>Distributed teams that share visual or spatial work.</strong> A whiteboard you can all stand around, a data visualisation you can walk through, a 3D model you can point at together. This overlaps heavily with the tooling questions any remote team faces; if you’re already thinking hard about the cost and lock-in of your collaboration stack, it’s worth reading how <a href="/story/the-saas-trap-how-per-seat-pricing-pushes-you-toward-self-hosting/">per-seat SaaS pricing quietly pushes you toward self-hosting</a>, because metaverse platforms are per-seat SaaS with an unusually expensive hardware dependency bolted on.</p>
<h2 id="where-its-expensive-theatre">Where it’s expensive theatre</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Now the part the vendors won’t tell you. For a great many “metaverse for business” pitches, the honest analysis is that a video call does the job better, cheaper, and without asking anyone to wear a headset that makes them nauseous after forty minutes.</p>
<p>Ordinary meetings are the clearest example. The pitch is that a VR meeting recreates “being in the room”. In practice you get a legless cartoon avatar, no eye contact, a device strapped to your face, and worse audio than a decent conference call. The body language that supposedly makes VR meetings special is mostly synthesised and mostly wrong. For a status update or a planning session, VR adds friction and subtracts nothing. Meta’s own internal meeting tool is a fine tech demo and a poor daily driver, which is why even Meta employees mostly use flat video calls like everyone else.</p>
<p>The honest test is simple: <strong>would this interaction be meaningfully worse as a video call?</strong> If the answer is no, you don’t need the metaverse for it. If the answer is “yes, because the spatial dimension is the point” — a building walkthrough, a hands-on training sim — then the headset earns its place. Most day-to-day business interaction fails that test, which is exactly why the trillion-dollar consumer metaverse hasn’t materialised even after tens of billions in spend.</p>
<h2 id="the-practical-cost-nobody-budgets-for">The practical cost nobody budgets for</h2>
<p>If you do have a real use case, budget honestly, because the headset price is the smallest line item. VR content is expensive to produce — a good training simulation is closer to commissioning a small video game than making a slide deck. Headsets need managing, updating, charging, cleaning, and replacing; they are shared devices with hygiene and inventory problems ordinary laptops don’t have. And the platforms are walled gardens, so whatever you build on one vendor’s system is a bet on that vendor still existing and still charging a price you can stomach in five years.</p>
<p>This is the same trap that catches every “just adopt the platform” decision, and it’s worth being as ruthless about it here as with any other infrastructure choice. The same accounting discipline I’d apply to whether <a href="/story/the-home-lab-upgrade-trap-when-good-enough-should-be-good-enough/">a home lab upgrade is actually worth it</a> applies tenfold to a corporate VR rollout: what problem does this solve that the boring existing tool doesn’t, and is the delta worth the total cost of ownership rather than the sticker price? If you can’t answer that in one sentence, you’re buying theatre.</p>
<h2 id="a-sane-strategy-if-you-want-one">A sane strategy, if you want one</h2>
<p>For most businesses, the correct metaverse strategy in the near term is: <strong>watch, pilot narrowly, commit to nothing broad.</strong> Concretely:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Find the one spatial use case that actually pays.</strong> Training, design review, or a specific customer-facing showpiece. Ignore the “virtual office” fantasy entirely.</li>
<li><strong>Pilot with a handful of headsets and a fixed budget</strong>, and measure against the boring alternative you already have — not against the vendor’s demo.</li>
<li><strong>Avoid deep platform lock-in.</strong> Prefer tools and content you can move if the vendor pivots or triples the price, and treat interoperability promises as marketing until a standard actually ships.</li>
<li><strong>Keep your everyday collaboration flat.</strong> Video calls, shared docs, chat. The metaverse is a specialist tool, not a replacement for the tools that already work.</li>
<li><strong>Watch the hardware curve before scaling.</strong> Headsets are getting lighter, cheaper, and less nauseating every generation. A pilot that fails today on comfort or price might pass in two years on the same use case. There’s no prize for being first, and a great deal of money to be lost being early.</li>
</ul>
<p>The through-line in all of this is discipline. The metaverse pitch works precisely because it’s vague — “you need a strategy for the future of work” is unfalsifiable, so it can’t be argued with, only bought. Refuse the vagueness. Insist on a specific task, a specific cost it removes, and a specific way to measure whether it worked. Every genuinely successful VR-in-business story I’ve seen shares that shape: someone identified one expensive physical problem and pointed a headset at it. Every failure I’ve seen shares the opposite shape: someone bought the vision first and went looking for a problem afterwards.</p>
<h2 id="the-verdict-useful-narrowly">The verdict: useful, narrowly</h2>
<p>Is the metaverse useful for business? Yes — for a small, specific set of tasks where spatial presence is genuinely the point, and where the cost of doing it in the real world is high. For those, VR is a real tool that saves real money, and I’d happily recommend it.</p>
<p>For everything else — the vast majority of meetings, collaboration, and “engagement” the marketing gestures at — it’s a solution hunting for a problem, and the honest answer is that your existing video calls and shared documents are already better. The companies that will benefit are the ones that treat it as a precise instrument for a specific job, not as a strategic imperative because a trillion-dollar company renamed itself after it. Spend on the use case, not on the word. And if a vendor can’t tell you, in one plain sentence, what the headset does that a screen doesn’t — smile politely, keep your headset in its box, and keep your money in the bank where it belongs.</p>
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