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Augmented reality revolves around using your smart phone or special eyeglasses to augment the real world with virtual elements.

Snap has delved deeply into the space, too, but has focused its efforts on augmented reality, a slightly different concept than VR.

Activision Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft, has earned well over $8 billion in lifetime revenue from the game. The place is a sword-and-sorcery geekdom with an undeniably large social component: People have met their spouses playing the game. The most famous example of these online, persistent game worlds is World of Warcraft, which has been going strong now for 17 years and still has about 5 million paying subscribers. Outside of books and movies, how close have we gotten to a metaverse in our world?Īside from Second Life, the most realized examples of metaverses have come from video games.

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Stephenson’s work would later influence The Matrix series and Ready Player One, a 2018 Steven Spielberg film based on a book by Ernest Cline from seven years earlier. Its author, Neal Stephenson, imagined a dystopian world where the book’s main character, a hacker/pizza delivery guy named Hiro Protagonist, travels back and forth from his grim reality to a 3D virtual cityscape, the Metaverse, that stretches for over 40,000 miles. The actual term “metaverse” comes from a best-selling 1992 sci-fi novel, Snow Crash. “It was expensive and hard to come up with a business model to make enough money from an arcade situation,” he says. Back then, a VR headset might cost as much as $3 million in current dollars, Lanier estimates. They were the only ones who could afford the technology. Where’d the idea come from?Ī computer scientist named Jaron Lanier first coined the term “virtual reality” in the 80s, and the first applications for VR were airlines, car makers, NASA and the military. Getting there, he noted, “will be a long road.” What is the metaverse?Ī boundless, 3D digital world accessed as easily as the internet, where we do things like hang out in a park, play a game, see a concert or suffer through a work conference. “Our goal is to help the metaverse reach a billion people and billions of dollars in commerce in the next decade,” Zuckerberg said on a conference call with Wall Street analysts last week. Another is the simple fact that we’re all a great deal more comfortable with virtual communication now after working from home for much of the past 20 months.

One is the ability to deploy more money in the next two or three years than the total of all the dollars spent on the metaverse during the prior 30 years. But Facebook does have a couple things going for it that others in the past didn’t. Fragments of it have kicked around Silicon Valley for years-as Second Life and Bezos’ interest in the metaverse make clear. Zuckerberg’s project isn’t earth shatteringly new. The numbers are big, but Facebook can stomach those losses just fine: It netted $29.1 billion in profits on $86 billion in sales last year. Under siege on multiple fronts, Zuckerberg has pinned his trillion-dollar company’s future to creating a metaverse, last week renaming Facebook as “Meta.” (For simplicity, we’ll continue to refer to Zuck’s company as Facebook in this story.) Zuckerberg has said the concept will cost $10 billion this year–then more in future years-and expects the metaverse to lose money for the foreseeable future. Today another tech billionaire hopes to finally-and more fully-conjure up the metaverse, and ironically, it’s the same person who helped bring about Second Life’s ruin: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Early investors like former schoolteacher Ailin Graef -briefly famous under her Second Life handle Anshe Chung-possessed Second Life real estate portfolios putatively worth $1 million or more as property prices spiked. After exchanging actual greenbacks for Second Life’s Linden Dollars, users were spending $100 million a year on virtual purchases, much of it on real estate. They could listen to Kurt Vonnegut give a live talk, dance at popular nightclubs like Hot Licks and Angry Ant, shop for both virtual clothes and real ones at the Armani store, visit reconstructions of famous landmarks like Rockefeller Center, have virtual sex -and, most famously, speculate on digital real estate. Those users roamed around as customizable, cartoonish versions of themselves called avatars and enjoyed a wide array of activities. In 2007, roughly a million people flocked to Second Life, eager to experience the three-dimensional, web-based alternative reality launched four years earlier. Facebook debuts its new company brand, Meta, at their headquarters on Octoin Menlo Park, California.

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