What Is The Metaverse? A (Kind Of) Simple Explainer
Despite how new it appears, it already feels like the metaverse is everywhere.
Facebook’s, recent rebrand and , triggered a new wave of interest in the metaverse. It’s all over headlines, corporate news, memes, gaming platforms, and social media. The word’s increased ubiquity is creating an impending sense of doom, as if, at any moment, our physical lives will be engulfed in corporate pixels and paywalled interactions. But Fortnite and Roblox have also been hyping up the metaverse for some time now and the term itself is actually decades old.
So what exactly is the metaverse?
Mark Zuckerburg’s version conjures an image of : You attend work meetings as an avatar using the Quest VR and use a to secretly text friends.When you go outside, you’ll wear that offer an augmented reality as well as record what you see and hear. The metaverse will be accessible through phones, computers, wearable tech, and headsets (or a combination of these) and it will be where you work, shop, exercise, socialize, watch movies, and game.
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But the term long predates many of the technologies that could actually make it possible. The suffix meta- means “behind or beyond,” it can also mean “more comprehensive” and even “transformative” (like metamorphosis). The second half of the word, -verse, derives from the word “universe” and describes either a specific sphere or area (like Twitterverse) or a fictional world, like the (sorry!), a speculative alternative universe literary genre known to organize characters into alphas, betas, and omegas. As a whole, the word “metaverse” generally refers to a virtual world that lies beyond, on top of, or is an extension of the physical world.
The word was coined in a 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel, Snow Crash, written by Neal Stephenson. In the book, the Metaverse is the sum of virtual and augmented realities concentrated on a super long “Street” through which people walk as avatars and can access using goggles and plugging into terminals. Public terminal users are rendered as blurry black and white avatars while those who pay for private terminals are rendered in full color and detail. Since then, the word “metaverse” has been used to describe all kinds of initiatives focused on creating a more permanent virtual reality that bleeds into our physical lives.
People have been trying to create immersive virtual worlds as early as , a pursuit powered by the world-building efforts of both the film and video game industries. One of the most-cited examples of metaverse is Second Life, an alt-reality computer game where you play through an avatar and could do just about anything — like build a house or get married — was created in 2003. It was such a real world it had – it doesn’t get more real than that. By 2006, there were enough serious metaverse enthusiasts to gather them for a summit.
That summit created the , a project that mapped the path to completing the metaverse. The defines the metaverse as, “the convergence of virtually-enhanced physical reality and [a] physically persistent virtual space.” In other words, it could look like a second world layered over the one we know through the use of augmented reality in addition to a virtual space we can come in-and-out-of, like the video game in Spy Kids 3. Think Snapchat filters or that Google feature that lets you see . The Metaverse Roadmap explains that, “the Metaverse wouldn’t be the entirety of the Internet–but like the Web, it would be seen by many as the most important part.”
We’ve seen a few rounds of metaverse hype throughout the years, but many of today’s evangelists will insist that for the first time ever, we have the technology, protocols, and infrastructure to step on the gas and make it real. They say it’s the next step after the mobile internet.
