To many, the metaverse is a childish-looking virtual world where Mark Zuckerberg invites us to socialize as clumsy, lifeless avatars. Few accepted the invitation. Now that Meta is scaling back several of its metaverse initiatives, commentators across the internet are closing this chapter with a cheerful mix of mischief over the company’s multi-billion-dollar losses and genuine bewilderment about how such a bizarre idea ever made it onto the agenda of an otherwise successful corporation.

And why wouldn’t we be bewildered? The metaverse never really offered a convincing use case for ordinary people. Unlike widely enjoyed online games such as Fortnite or Roblox — which provide fun game mechanics and opportunities for creative exploration — the metaverse mostly offered the chance to, well, stand somewhere and look around. The idea that we would attend concerts through such applications betrays a misunderstanding of why people go to concerts in the first place, as the metaverse conveys little of the energy and shared excitement that such physical gatherings can generate. Social interaction among friends or colleagues, perhaps the flagship use case, did succeed in reproducing the spatial layout of real-life encounters. Yet for most users, it lacked even the most basic social signals, such as eye gaze or facial expressions, turning real people into involuntary protagonists in a virtual puppet show.

The metaverse is thus sometimes portrayed as a sophisticated but ultimately useless piece of technology — as clunky as a Segway, and as socially catastrophic as an umbrella hat.

Beneath the waves of the hype cycle, however, the technology itself has been quietly moving toward real-world practicality. In just a few years, headsets have evolved from delivering pixelated images to immersing users in visually comfortable environments while tracking their eye movements, facial expressions, and gestures. Research already shows that when these social signals are rendered in real time on more realistic avatars, people can interact in virtual spaces in surprisingly natural ways. The popular image of the metaverse as a habitat for inexpressive Lego figurines is therefore less a verdict on the technology’s potential than a consequence of Meta’s decision to push immature technology into the mass market.

But still: why would people choose to meet as avatars rather than simply opening Zoom — even if those avatars faithfully transmit eye contact, facial expressions, and gestures?

The notion that much of social life should migrate wholesale into a computerized realm indeed belongs more to dystopian fiction than to everyday reality. What is emerging instead is something more modest and more interesting: Researchers and practitioners across disciplines are exploring more specific situations in which meeting as avatars offers genuine advantages. Students can embark on virtual field trips, walking through ancient cities together or exploring three-dimensional representations of molecules and galaxies. Language learners can practice with tandem partners abroad, scaffolding conversation through shared spaces, pointing, and object manipulation — much like being immersed in a foreign country as an exchange student. For mobility-impaired or elderly individuals, virtual spaces can make social participation easier: sitting around a virtual table to play a board game may sound trivial, yet it is a small pleasure that everyday logistics too often make difficult. Because these interactions rely on the same social signals as face-to-face encounters — including eye gaze and body language — they may also help keep social skills active, which can fade during isolation or through the dominance of text- and video-based communication. Naturalistic virtual interaction might even offer an antidote to the now-famous “Gen Z stare” in adolescents who spend their days typing “lol” and “rofl” while gazing at their phones with perfectly neutral expressions.

In all of these cases, metaverse applications are not meant to replace other forms of communication, but to enable brief, purposeful interactions that would otherwise be impractical or impossible.

The idea of “the metaverse” as an always-on replacement for physical interaction is likely gone for good — and commentators are right not to shed any tears. Yet as the technology continues to mature, it may offer meaningful ways for people to connect across a wide range of life situations, enabling and even training the natural processes that underlie human social interaction.