Maybe a new trailer for a Superman film dropped, and Warner Bros. It's a moving target of a definition-which isn't a bad thing, but let's take a moment and share a vision of what might come to pass if tech and game companies make the Metaverse come to life.Īfter you wake up and brew some coffee, you strap on a VR or AR headset to get started for the day. Sometimes it's about making it possible to exclusively own digital property. Sometimes the Metaverse refers to game spaces where characters from different fictional worlds can overlap. Facebook's VR projects are the Metaverse. Something clicked in the popular consciousness with Stephen Spielberg's 2018 film adaptation of Ready Player One, and now the phrase is ubiquitous.
In both books, it's a virtual universe where players can interact via fully inhabited avatars, living impossible lives that can't be fulfilled in the real world. The word was popularized by Neil Stephenson's 1991 book Snow Crash, but also iterated on in Ernest Cline's 2011 book Ready Player One. The Metaverse is the dream of a fully connected, realized digital world. If you're new to the Metaverse party, let's get you caught up. Maybe we can save ourselves a few years of hype and speculation if we start admitting that? It's also a heady illusion-one difficult to describe, impossible to execute on, and frankly it feels like a word meant to help some companies make it to the next quarter.
