Open Source: Is the metaverse the future or a money pit?
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
I’m Brian Gordon, tech reporter for The News & Observer, and this is Open Source, a weekly newsletter on business, labor and technology in North Carolina.
Point: “We see (the metaverse) as the next big change in gaming and in Epic’s evolution as a company.” — Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney in March.
Counterpoint: “Almost every poor, money-losing decision Epic has made over the last few years can be traced back to Sweeney and his metaverse ambitions.” — Forbes, the day after Epic Games cut 830 jobs last week.
What is the metaverse? Epic Games, the influential Cary-based game developer, envisages it as an interactive 3D virtual space where users can play games, watch movies, shop, try on outfits, attend concerts, hold business meetings or just hang out. Sort of like a new internet, only people would access it by strapping on VR headsets.
Epic hasn’t been alone in its metaverse dreams. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg famously invested heavily in the metaverse, going as far as changing his company’s name to Meta in 2021.
This year however, both companies made significant layoffs. Meta reduced its metaverse silicon unit only a few days ago. And last week, Epic laid off 16% of its staff — including 170 local employees — with Sweeney citing metaverse costs as cause for the cuts.
After years of bullish sentiment towards the metaverse, general enthusiasm has chilled said Janna Anderson, director of the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University. In June, her center released an analysis on the virtual space.
“It is expensive, time-consuming and often quite impossible to accelerate technological development as quickly as the public and investors would like to see it happen,” she said.
Anderson noted the tech industry often reacts to emerging technologies with ebbs and flows, rushing to put money behind concepts like say self-driving cars before easing up.
Sweeney retains a grand vision for an open metaverse. Last week, he told staff he is committed to getting Epic “to the other side of profitability and become a leading metaverse company.”
This vision has already come at a price. We’ll see if it’s all worth it.
For readers familiar with the metaverse concept, I’d be curious to hear if you think people will embrace it. I’ve found the tech neat but don’t love wearing the headset for extended periods of time.
On to the rest of this week’s news:
Duke professor’s research draws more coverage and questions
In past newsletters, I’ve discussed Duke professor Dan Ariely, the well-known behavioral psychologist/economist who has come under fire for manipulated data that appeared in research he and other authors published on honesty.
In one notable redacted paper, Ariely and fellow researchers found asking respondents to sign honesty pledges at the top of self-reports — rather than at the end — made them more likely to answer factually. In 2021, a group of data analysts discovered this paper relied on data with signs of tampering.
Then, in a July episode of the NPR podcast “Planet Money,” the insurance company The Hartford confirmed the data it provided Ariely for this honesty study “was manipulated inappropriately” after Ariely received the data.
This week, a feature story in The New Yorker raised further questions about the connections between past altered data, Ariely, and another famous researcher, Francesca Gino, who previously taught at UNC-Chapel Hill before moving to Harvard University (where she is currently on unpaid administrative leave).
The story actually calls into question a lot of pop-behavioral psychology over the past 20 years. The same day The New Yorker article ran online, The New York Times published its own feature on Gino and Ariely.
Both researchers deny wrongdoing.
In August, Ariely wrote to me that he “never manipulated or misrepresented data in any of my work and have never knowingly participated in any project where the data or conclusions were manipulated or misrepresented.”
Duke University will not comment on whether the school is looking into Ariely’s work, saying it “is required by policy to maintain the confidentiality of research misconduct investigations, including the existence of such investigations.”
Read The New Yorker piece for all the details, but I did follow up on one line in the story: The author said MetLife and BlackRock, former funders of Ariely’s lab at Duke (called the Center for Advanced Hindsight), were no longer giving money.
MetLife has its global tech campus in Cary, so I asked the company if it had in fact stopped funding Ariely’s lab, and if so, why.
A MetLife spokesperson responded that the funding to the Center for Advanced Hindsight “was a four-year grant that concluded in Dec. 2022.”
I asked why it hadn’t been renewed but received no additional information.
AI at the self-checkout
Next time you’re at a Harris Teeter self-checkout, look up. There’s a good chance every arm movement you make and every item you scan is being tracked by an AI platform called Everseen. It’s used to cut down on customers improperly scanning items (both accidentally and not-so-accidentally).
Everseen AI was previously used by Walmart, though not anymore, and it runs on Lenovo servers designed right here in Research Triangle.
VinFast stomachs big losses
This week, the Vietnamese EV maker VinFast saw its volatile stock dip below a symbolic threshold. Then on Thursday, it reported another quarter of pretty substantial net losses (more than $600 million this summer).
VinFast wants to be a global brand, and key to its U.S. ambitions is a $4 billion manufacturing and assembly plant in Chatham County.
Building an EV startup is expensive. For example, Rivian lost $1.2 billion just this spring. But Rivian, which is based in California, has connected with some U.S. customers. VinFast is still looking.
Short Stuff
Tomorrow, UNC football is hosting ACC rival Syracuse. It will also be the first university’s first “Champion Sustainability Game,” a celebration of Kenan Stadium’s new LED lights. The sustainability initiative will be powered by software from the growing Raleigh startup GreenPlaces.
North Carolina’s richest person (Jim Goodnight) got richer while the state’s third-richest person (Epic’s Tim Sweeney) got considerably less rich, according to the new Forbes list of the 400 Wealthiest Americans.
NC Innovation, the new economic growth nonprofit set to receive $500 million in public dollars, named regional directors to its four hub campuses at Western Carolina University, UNC-Charlotte, North Carolina A&T, and East Carolina University.
National Tech Happenings
Netflix reportedly plans to raise its rates again after the actors’ strike concludes. Send me your passwords please.
The trial of crypto’s antihero Sam Bankman-Fried began this week in Manhattan.
Men crashed a job fair intended for women and nonbinary tech workers in Orlando this week. Many attendees/organizers were understandably displeased. As one TikTok poster put it: “The Kens had taken over Barbieland.”
Thanks for reading!
Open Source
Do you enjoy Triangle tech news? Subscribe to Open Source, The News & Observer's weekly technology newsletter and look for it in your inbox every Friday morning. Sign up here.
