Or they may come to pass, but turn out to be not so great.Ī metaverse administered by Facebook might not be a place you want to go. 'Your friends are seeing the things that you've bought and everybody is able to buy these things with a cryptocurrency.' One big shopping mall?īut these visions, he adds, may not come to pass. 'When you hear people talk about the metaverse, they'll get excited about things like intellectual property being able to be transferred from a movie into all of the different worlds that you're a part of. 'That's the vision that the big tech companies promote,' Dr Kelly said. These in-game items have been bought with Fortnite's 'V-Bucks'.

In Fortnite, for example, Disney-approved Star Wars avatars rub shoulders with avatars wearing NFL-approved player uniforms. In April, Epic Games raised $US1 billion in funding to invest in the metaverse.Įpic makes Fortnite, which looks like a proto-metaverse: as well as a hugely popular game, it's a social network, a virtual showroom for intellectual property, and a marketplace for in-game currency. Users (wearing a $US300 Oculus headset) choose a legless cartoon avatar and then sit at a virtual conference room having virtual meetings with co-workers. It's a bit like Zoom, but with virtual reality. In August, Mr Zuckerberg launched a new virtual reality (VR) app, Horizon Workrooms, that was billed as part of his realisation of the metaverse. A convergence of gaming, social, and commerce Now internet technology has advanced to the point where we can (maybe) build the metaverse for real.

William Gibson introduced the concept of a virtual collective 'cyberspace' in the 1984 novel Neuromancer, and Neal Stephenson coined the term itself in the 1992 novel Snow Crash.Īs it happens, both these novels are dystopias where people take refuge in virtual universes to escape crumbling societies. Heady stuff! But beyond the hype, the idea of the metaverse is an old one. Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella has said his company is working on building something called the 'enterprise metaverse' where 'the digital and physical worlds converge'.ĭavid Baszucki, the founder of the $US41 billion gaming platform Roblox, recently wrote: 'The metaverse is arguably as big a shift in online communication as the telephone or the internet.'

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