Vitalik Buterin Skeptical on the Utility of Virtual Reality in Digital Space

• Vitalik Buterin expressed his skeptical thoughts on the utility of VR.
• He tweeted that he doesn’t believe in VR for the sake of VR.
• Buterin’s tweet was in response to the loss faced by Meta.

Vitalik Buterin, the founder and CEO of Ethereum tweeted that his concern with Virtual Reality is similar to the anti-crypto people’s concern about crypto. According to him, it is a feeling that “people are in love with the idea of it in a way that far outpaces actual applications”.

Buterin’s tweet questioned the nature of VR as he doesn’t believe in the existence of “VR for the sake of VR”:

He added that he believes that the technology is unlikely to get serious traction until “important applications” exist.

With the announcement of the new VR project on Facebook, the term metaverse had become widely popular on the internet. Following the trend, there arose a lot of heated discussions on the topic of metaverse in technology.

Also, tracing back to the novel “Snow Crash” (1992), by the American writer Neal Stephenson, the concept of metaverse could be found being discussed. Afterward, the idea went viral with Facebook, Tencent, and ByteDance.

The tweet of Buterin was in response to the report of a loss of over 70% in Meta’s stock which was a disappointing set of quarterly results. While digital assets in general have been facing severe loss due to the severe macroeconomic conditions, Meta was at the peak of this crisis due to the widely expensive bet on the metaverse.

It is noteworthy that the company’s metaverse unit lost almost $9.4 billion and there are assumptions that the year ahead would be even worse.

Though the concept of VR is widespread and accepted by many, Vitalik Buterin shared his skeptical stance on the technology even though he stressed the point that he believed in the existence of such important applications.