This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
When news broke last week that Meta may cut the budget of its Meta Reality Labs unit by as much as 30 percent, followed by reports that the company is delaying the release of future headsets, pundits immediately jumped on this to proclaim that the metaverse, and by extension VR, is dead.
"Meta slashes budget as VR dream implodes," declared IBT, and Bob O'Donnell from Technalysis Research argued that "VR was never the right choice."
That discussion got muddied by the fact that …