Sure, calling that a metaverse probably sounds better. If those dreams become realized, you’ll probably end up buying crap and yelling at people through a head-mounted display, instead of through your smartphone. So far, the most viable applications of VR and AR can be found in medicine, architecture, and manufacturing, but dreams of its widespread consumer appeal persist. Facebook, Apple, and others have also invested heavily in augmented reality, a kind of computer graphics that uses goggles to overlay interactive elements onto a live view of the world. Oculus is also making a 3-D, virtual platform called Horizon-think Minecraft with avatars, but without the blocks. Facebook owns a company called Oculus, which manufactures and sells VR computers and headsets. In the simplest explanation, the metaverse is just a sexy, aspirational name for some kind of virtual or augmented-reality play. Ironically, these writers clearly meant to warn us off those dreams, rather than inspire them. Dick-of having people jack into a virtual, parallel reality with goggles or brain implants. No such entity exists today, of course, just as no real product even approximates the rough idea-drawn from Stephenson or William Gibson or Philip K. A facility of computers in the desert runs the metaverse, and the novel’s characters hang out inside the simulation because their real lives are boring or difficult. But that book offers scarce detail about the actual operation of the alternate-reality dreamworld it posits. No article on this topic would be complete without a mention of the 1992 novel Snow Crash, in which Neal Stephenson coined the term. Even within sci-fi, it doesn’t mean much. More broadly, though, it’s a fantasy of power and control.īeyond science fiction, metaverse means almost nothing. In a narrow sense, this phrase refers to internet-connected glasses. According to a report this week from The Verge, the Facebook chief may soon rebrand his company to mark its change in focus from social media to “the metaverse.” Now comes news that Mark Zuckerberg has embraced the premise of The Matrix, that we can plug ourselves into a big computer and persist as flesh husks while reality decays around us. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other purveyors of private space travel imagine a celestial paradise where we can thrive as a “ multiplanet species.” That’s the dream of films such as Interstellar and Wall-E. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it.Īnd yet, some of your wealthiest fellow earthlings would like to do exactly that. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair.

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