⌥ The Metaverse Fever Dream

1. Meta You probably know the gist. Predictions and dire warnings of a future lived in an immersive virtual world had been around for decades before Neal Stephenson solidified the concept in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash”, but Stephenson called it the “metaverse”, and that was important. It was a cautionary tail. Not everyone understood that. The video game Second Life, launched in 2003, provided an early glimpse of the concept in a P.C. environment. Another piece of the puzzle, consumer-grade virtual reality, began to take shape when Oculus was founded in 2012, and shipped a developer-centric version of its virtual reality headset in 2013. The company was acquired by Facebook a year later. Oculus released a few more headsets while Facebook figured out what to do to “truly transform the way we live, work and connect with each other”. Despite this goal, “metaverse” was not yet part of Facebook’s lingo, though it was in Oculus’ vocabulary. A 2015 internal memo from Mark Zuckerberg does not…