Charlie Fink’s Metaverse book review: get to know XR at 360 degrees

I’m back in Italy. My vacation in China has finished and I’m in my home country again. Being in China has been wonderful and I have really sweet memories of it… I’ll return there for sure, there are so many things I have still to discover.

Travelling have been really tiresome: the flight lasted around 11 hours and then there was all the time to get from and to the two airports and all the waiting times… from the time I left my hotel in Beijing to the moment I opened the door of my house, I’ve spent more than 24 hours! Luckily, to help me in surviving all those dead times, I had something that helped me in keeping my brain active and in daydreaming: the book METAVERSE by Charlie Fink.

Metaverse is the book written by the journalist and futurist Charlie Fink to explain the current status of virtual and augmented reality. If you don’t know who Charlie Fink is, well, open Google and start looking for some of his online posts. He is an awesome writer and regularly writes amazing posts on Forbes regarding AR and VR. I still remember some of his posts that I liked the most, like one on the coolest augmented reality startups of current time and one on location-based VR entertainment. He’s a man with great experience and has worked in the past with big corporates like AOL and Disney. A great mind, with great writing skills and a great passion for XR: it was for sure one of the best candidates to write a book about these technologies. I’ve also had the pleasure to chat with him and the book has been a kind of gift of him.

Being written by such a skilled author, I can assure you that the book is a high-quality one. It really encompasses everything about virtual and augmented reality, like for instance:

• The difference between AR and VR;
• The XR hardware;
• 360 videos;
• The artistic uses of XR;
• Telepresence;
• AR and VR entertainment;
• AR and VR in China;
• Emulation of the various senses in VR (haptic, smell, taste, etc…);

And many more topics. Charlie has really made an amazing job in writing about every aspect of augmented and virtual reality. And all of this has been made with the help of experts of the various topics he talked about: for instance, when talking about the developments of the AR Cloud, Mr. Fink was helped by two of the biggest authorities in this field, like Ori Inbar and the unpronounceable Matt Miesnieks. This means that reading this book, you can learn everything about AR and VR, it can take you from zero to hero.

The problem of having so many topics in a less than 300 pages book, is that no topic is deeply detailed, so this book can’t make you an expert in anything AR-VR related. But it can give you the basis: if there is some sector into which you absolutely know nothing, this book can give you the foundations, leaving you the task to dive deeper on your own. For instance, I had not much knowledge regarding telepresence and this book gave me some interesting insights.

Another problem that I found in having so many guests in the book is that many chapters have been written by many different people and this means different writing styles, something that disturbed me a bit because I felt the book more fragmented because of it.

Metaverse also features some AR features: at the end of each chapter, there is an AR tag that you can frame with your smartphone (provided that you downloaded the Fink Metaverse app) to open some additional content. This additional content can be a video to elaborate on the just read chapter or a 3D animated sequence, often very funny. At the end of the book, the AR features also show you some cool work of augmented reality art. Speaking frankly, while I understand the choice of giving AR features to a book dedicated to AR and VR, I found that these AR multimedia elements don’t add that much to the reading experience. So, most of the times, I skipped them. They’re nice, but not useful. And when I read, I don’t want to take out my phone, I just want to appreciate the smell of paper, so I haven’t appreciated them. I really loved the AR artwork in the latest pages of the book, though: especially the flower coming out from the book… I was really delighted by it.

The book is really dense, really full of concepts and things to learn, so I soon discovered that is not very good to read during a flight. It is not something to read to spend your time, it is more something to read to learn. I think that 10-20 pages of Metaverse for reading sessions are enough: then you have to let your mind dream a bit about the topics you have just read and maybe open your laptop to start googling the companies and the technical terms you have just read.

Metaverse is a book that never ends to be written. “This book is out of date. It was out of date the day it was written” are its first sentences. AR and VR are moving so fast that it is impossible to write an updated book about it. That’s why on the book’s website, Charlie writes continuous online updates to make the book follow all the latest developments of virtual and augmented reality. For instance, in the book, there are no details on the standalone headset Vive Focus, because it wasn’t released yet when the book was written, but you can find them in the online updates. A very smart choice by the writer.

A friend of mine asked me if he has to buy Metaverse or not. Well, as always, it depends. I think that the book is well written and the intro and the closing chapters, that have been written by Charlie Fink putting there all his experience and his passion, really made me excited and inspired. Mr. Fink has a lot of experience and lived a lot of technological revolutions: he was at AOL when consumer internet was just starting and saw the web becoming what is now. So his opinion on technology is really deep and savvy. Also the fact that covers every aspect of AR and VR, with lots of insights from experts of the field, is great to teach you all about these new paradigms. It also gives you lots of cues to think on.

But honestly, I won’t advise Metaverse to someone like me that has worked in VR for years and reads XR news every day. Reading online posts on Medium, Road To VR, Upload VR, Reddit, etc… and working in this environment, you can basically learn 80% of the topics that are written in the book. It was interesting for me learning the remaining 20%, but maybe I wouldn’t have bought a book just for this.

I’d instead really advise buying the book to anyone that wants to enter the AR and VR world. Or to anyone that is in this world from too little time and/or that has not the time to read the XR news every day (well, if this is the case, I would also advise you to subscribe to my newsletter!). I think that just reading this book plus the online add-ons, one person can really keep pace with current AR and VR status. It is a fast forward that can avoid you reading tons of online posts to learn what has happened in the latest months. It is a great book about what are these technologies and what people all around the world are doing with them. Furthermore, it is also a great source of inspiration.

I think Metaverse can be the answer to “How to get started with virtual and augmented reality?”. You start there, with Charlie guiding you as a sherpa, and then you go on your own once you know how to orientate alone.

Honestly, I feel a bit embarrassed for having reviewed a book of such a great writer while being just a simple blogger. But I hope that this article will help you in deciding if Metaverse is the book for you. And if it is not for you, well, my advice of reading Charlie’s articles on Forbes is still valid…