Good question. “Metaverse” is currently a buzzword in the worlds of technology, business, and finance, and like all buzzwords, its definition is fuzzy, contested, and shaped by the ambitions of the people who use it.
Here’s one thing we can say for sure: The term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash to describe a virtual world widely used in his imagined future, a 21st-century dystopia. In Snow Crash, the metaverse is a virtual reality world depicted as a globe-circling marketplace where virtual real estate can be bought and sold, and where VR headset users inhabit 3D avatars whose form they are free to choose.
These three elements—a VR interface, digital property, and avatars—still figure prominently in current conceptions of the metaverse. But none of them are really essential to the idea. In broader terms, the metaverse is understood as a graphically rich, verisimilitude-like virtual space where people can work, play, shop, socialize—in short, do the things that humans like to do together in real life (or, perhaps more to the point, on the internet). Metaverse proponents often focus on the concept of “presence” as a defining factor: feeling like you’re actually there, and feeling like other people are there with you.
This version of the metaverse probably already exists in the form of video games. But there’s another definition of the metaverse that goes beyond the virtual worlds we’re familiar with. This definition doesn’t really describe the metaverse, but it does explain why everyone thinks it’s so important. This definition isn’t about a vision for the future or a new technology. Instead, it looks to the past and the now-common technologies of the internet and smartphones, and assumes that we’ll need to invent the metaverse to replace them.
Influential venture capitalist Matthew Ball, who has written student data extensively about the metaverse, describes it as “a kind of successor state to the mobile internet.” (Mark Zuckerberg, who last year named his company Facebook Meta and said the metaverse would be his focus, used a nearly identical phrase; clearly, Ball’s essays are hugely influential in Silicon Valley thinking.) Remember when smartphones revolutionized technology, the economy, and society itself? The metaverse is expected to be a similar game-changer, and many companies are looking to get ahead of it.
There are many things to challenge about Ball’s vision, but the biggest is his proposal that the metaverse will be a single network as open, interconnected, and interoperable as the internet is now. That’s a big ask. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
IS THE METAVERSE NEW?
In short: no. We’ve already established that the term has been around for 30 years, and not just in fictional form. It’s been part of corporate visions of the future for some time. During the first VR boom of the ’90s, British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s put together a VR shopping demo that’s eerily similar to a video Walmart made in 2017.
Marketing pieces and proof-of-concept demos aside, metaverse-like virtual worlds have been around for almost as long as their fictional counterparts. Hype articles about people getting married in the metaverse will elicit a sigh of recognition from anyone who has followed online gaming over the past few decades. One of the most famous virtual worlds, and perhaps the closest to the metaverse ideal, is Second Life, an “online multimedia platform” launched in 2003.
The Metaverse, Explained!
Second Life . Image: Linden Labs
Second Life largely resembles a massively multiplayer online role-playing game from the early 2000s, like World of Warcraft , but with all the gameplay stripped away: the combat, the quests, the stories, the rewards. It fulfills many of the roles envisioned for the metaverse of the future, and has done so since its launch. Users are embodied in avatars and live with each other in virtual spaces. They enjoy virtual versions of real-world experiences, from business meetings to nightclubs. Users can create their own content and services and trade with each other. There is a virtual economy with its own currency, which can be exchanged for real-world currency. Second Life is almost a textbook metaverse, to the extent that such a thing exists.