Do you ever catch yourself thinking, ‘You know, I need to spend less time in the real world and more on the internet’? If so, Mark Zuckerberg has good news for you! The Facebook founder is promoting the development of the ‘metaverse’ – a virtual reality world, or virtual reality worlds, that would allow us to be in rather than on social media.
That might sound far-fetched but think about how odd it would have sounded to people a few decades ago, before the internet, if you had told them you would be able to speak to people in Britain, Bhutan and Bangladesh simultaneously. The concept can be reduced to the radicalisation of the immersiveness that already unites us with our phones. The visual and audio elements will be augmented, if things go as planned, to produce 3D and sensory virtual environments.
The term comes from Neal Stephenson’s heady sci-fi novel Snow Crash, in which ‘the Metaverse’ exists as a virtual alternative to physical reality.
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