Thesis: Metaverse is Dead?
Necessity Platforms and How We Will
Dominate Augmented Reality
The metaverse didn't fail because the technology wasn't ready. It failed because everyone built the wrong thing.
Meta lost $70 billion. Horizon Worlds has 200,000 users. Decentraland has 38 daily actives in a $1.3 billion ecosystem. The common diagnosis is that VR technology isn't good enough yet, or that people don't want virtual worlds. Both diagnoses are wrong.
The technology works fine. Vision Pro's resolution is incredible. Quest 3's tracking is perfect. The problem is more fundamental: they built entertainment platforms when they should have built necessity platforms.
The Entertainment Trap
Every failed metaverse made the same mistake. They created virtual worlds and asked people to visit them. This is backwards.
Think about the technologies that actually became part of daily life. Email didn't succeed by being fun. GPS didn't win by being entertaining. They succeeded by solving problems people already had. The metaverse is failing because it's trying to create new problems instead of solving existing ones.
Horizon Worlds is a place you go to when you're bored. But infrastructure isn't about curing boredom. Infrastructure is about making necessary tasks more efficient. When a platform is entertainment, using it is a choice. When a platform is infrastructure, not using it is a handicap.
The Reality Requirement
The metaverse will only work if it's anchored to physical reality. Not as a metaphor, but as a fundamental design principle.
Current platforms ask you to leave reality behind. Put on a headset, forget where you are, become someone else, be somewhere else. This is precisely wrong. The winning metaverse will intensify your awareness of where you actually are and who's actually around you.
Your physical location contains latent information and connections. The people near you right now have skills, needs, resources, and intentions that might align with yours. But this information is invisible. We walk past opportunities every day because we lack the interface to see them.
The metaverse should be that interface. Not a different world, but a computational layer on this world. Not an escape from your surroundings, but a way to understand them better.
The Seamless Loop
The people in your virtual world shouldn't be random avatars from across the globe. They should be your actual neighbors, rendered in 3D. Put on a Vision Pro at home, interact with neighbors in virtual space, plan tomorrow's activities. Take off the headset, walk downstairs, continue the same conversations in person. This seamless transition between digital and physical interaction is what every other platform fails to deliver.
Why Now Is Different
Something fundamental has changed in the last two years. Not VR hardware, though that's improved. The change is in spatial computing's ability to understand and map physical space.
Computers can now look at a room and understand it as a room. They can recognize objects, track positions, anchor digital content to physical surfaces. This isn't about making virtual worlds more realistic. It's about making the real world more computable.
When you can query physical space like you query a database, everything changes. Communities become discoverable. Resources become findable. Coordination becomes frictionless. The technology to do this exists today. It's just being applied to the wrong problems.
The Path That Works
The winning metaverse will arrive in stages, and the first stage won't even mention the metaverse.
Stage 1: A platform that solves coordination problems in physical space. Not specific problems, but categories of problems that exist everywhere. Resource sharing within buildings. Activity coordination within neighborhoods. Skill exchange within communities.
Stage 2: Spatial features that make coordination more efficient. View tomorrow's event space in 3D today. See where available resources are located. Understand movement patterns and timing conflicts before they happen.
Stage 3: Ambient computing that makes the platform invisible. You don't open an app to check what's nearby. Your devices already know and surface what's relevant when it's relevant.
By Stage 3, you're living in the metaverse. You just don't call it that because it doesn't feel like a destination. It feels like reality with better information.
The Complete Chain
Our path is clear: solve real problems → build an indispensable hyperlocal tool → accumulate a high-retention network based on real-world relationships → elevate this network to spatial computing → achieve seamless integration between virtual and physical interactions → become the essential social infrastructure of the metaverse era.
Each step makes the next one inevitable. Each stage creates value independently while building toward the larger vision.
The Interface to Reality
We're building Aiiioli to be this interface. Not another social network, but a computational layer for physical space. Not another virtual world, but a way to make the real world more connected.
The platform works wherever you are, revealing the hidden social and resource layer of your immediate surroundings. Office buildings, residential complexes, university campuses, conference venues - each becomes more functional when its latent connections become visible.
This isn't the only path to the metaverse. But any successful path must pass through necessity, not novelty. It must enhance reality, not replace it. It must solve problems people already have, not create new ways to waste time.
The metaverse everyone imagined is coming. It just won't look like anyone imagined it. It will look exactly like regular life, except things that should be easy finally are.