[smoldesu]

I'm hardly an advocate for any of Facebook/Meta's actions over the past... however long, but a lot of people forget that "Metaverse" doesn't just mean "virtual reality". VR could be a large component here, but the biggest goal of the Metaverse is really to map physical things into a digital world. That data can be used in any number of ways, not just VR/AR; it could be used to provide 3D models for common shopping goods in the Walmart app, give meteorologists an interactive forecast maps, map GitHub repositories to technology that you use every day... the list goes on. The real goal is ripping digital metadata from real-world objects, which could indeed be inferenced like an AI model for any number of uses.