The imaged applications are not about a VR Second Life rip off, or gaming at all. That’s just the demo — ignore it. The Metaverse is also about AR. Augmenting your vision affects you in your walk-around life, adding live captions that tell you the name of a person you’ve met before (but can’t recall where), adding walking navigation aids where GPS fails to locate you exactly (like malls, airports), and showing you which pan is still hot on the stove before you touch it. It might tell you — just by looking at them — that your kid has a temperature before he even starts whining, or when your plants need water, or the gluten content of food on your plate, or that you are about to drive over black ice and should slow down or steer around it. And (and this is very important for many wives) tells the husband where the Orange juice is in the fridge when he is looking straight at it, or finds his socks.

AR glasses can save lives, and make life more interesting, safe, and convenient. It can also inject unwanted ads into your life, which is why it’s considered such a valuable asset. But sometimes (rarely, for me), the ad presented shows exactly what you need, and with AI predicting behaviors, it might even become useful enough to pay the price for the intrusion. Ads are not FBs strength, however, many other companies are competing in this space, and the companies that offer the best advances with the least annoyances may win over FB.