With interest in continued remote work and remote learning, the vision of building open and shared virtual environments leads to new products. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he sees the metaverse — a term widely used in both tech and science fiction to describe broadly shared, open virtual environments — as “the successor to the mobile internet.” Zuckerberg also said it was “not something that any one company is going to build.”
" - Axios
Facebook is well-positioned to push VR/ AR ahead and get the parts working together on one platform. Presumably, Apple, Microsoft, and Google will not be content to cede that market…and who knows who else will want to play. Possibly big media producers such as Netflix.
One vision of the future would have educational VR/AR becoming “huge” for online learning with greatly increased immersion into the media for students/learners. With greater immersion, comes a slew of learning benefits, such as emotional connections, self-motivated learners, better retention, and interactive group learning online.