During the first VR boom of the ’90s, U.K. It’s formed a part of corporate visions of the future for quite some time. We’ve already established that the term has been around for 30 years, and not just in fictional form.

There are many things to challenge in Ball’s vision, but the biggest is his proposition that the metaverse will be a single network as open, interconnected, and interoperable as the internet is now.

The influential venture capitalist Matthew Ball, who has written extensively about the metaverse, describes it as “a sort of successor state to the mobile internet.” (Mark Zuckerberg, who last year gave his company Facebook the name Meta and said the metaverse would be its focus, has used an almost identical phrase clearly, Ball’s essays are hugely influential on Silicon Valley thinking.) Remember when smartphones revolutionized tech, the economy, and society itself? The metaverse is expected to be an equivalent watershed, and lots of businesses want to get ahead of that. Rather, it looks to the past and to the now commonplace technologies of the internet and smartphones, and assumes that it will be necessary to invent the metaverse to replace them. This definition isn’t about a vision for the future or a new technology. This definition doesn’t actually describe the metaverse at all, but does explain why everyone thinks it’s so important. But there’s another definition of the metaverse that goes beyond the virtual worlds we know. This version of the metaverse arguably already exists in the form of video games. Metaverse proponents often focus on the concept of “presence” as a defining factor: feeling like you’re really there, and feeling like other people are really there with you, too. In the broadest terms, the metaverse is understood as a graphically rich virtual space, with some degree of verisimilitude, where people can work, play, shop, socialize - in short, do the things humans like to do together in real life (or, perhaps more to the point, on the internet). But none of them is actually essential to the idea. These three elements - a VR interface, digital ownership, and avatars - still feature prominently in current conceptions of the metaverse.

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