The Metaverse: its time has come

By Jesse Karjalainen

It was in January 1946 that the comic-strip detective Dick Tracy first began using a new crime-fighting device: the now iconic two-way wrist radio. This ingenious fictional device transformed into a two-way wrist TV in 1964. This was the original smartwatch.

The Dick Tracy comic strip was created by the American cartoonist Chester Gould in 1931, appearing at a time when radio broadcasting was going mainstream - back when people listened to "the wireless ". This new technology swept around the world in the pre-war years.

Dick Tracy's watch is said to have sparked the boyhood imagination of US engineer Martin Cooper, who in 1973 became the first person to make a handheld cellular phone call - using the Motorola device that he created.

The first digital watch appeared in 1972 and Seiko acquired its technology six years later. Seiko and Casio endured a fierce rivalry during the 1980s for dominance of the "digital watch" market. The traditional watch (digital or otherwise) was usurped once mobile phones included a time feature as standard.

Jump forward through three decades of false starts and technological innovation, and the Apple Watch appeared in stores in 2015. (By the way, it was never called the iWatch.) By 2017, Apple's Series 3 watch was the first to feature cellular connectivity. What had once been a fantastic idea limited only to comic strips and childhood imagination - Dick Tracy's famous radio wristwatch - finally became a reality. Its time had come.

The smartwatch didn't appear out of nowhere. It evolved from imagination to reality at the same time as computing and technology evolved.

Imagining the Metaverse

Science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson is credited with "inventing" the metaverse in his novel 'Snow Crash', published in 1992. For younger readers, this was before mobile phones and the World Wide Web went mainstream. (It was two years, even, before the first episode of Friends was broadcast through the airwaves.)

The fictional Metaverse is described as a "perfectly spherical" virtual spherical planet with a circumference of 65,536km. By contrast, the Earth's circumference is 40,075km. This vast tract of virtual real estate is owned and controlled by Global Multimedia Protocol Group (GMPG).

In Stephenson's novel, users access the Metaverse via high-quality virtual-reality goggles. More specifically, they use personal terminals that project the virtual world onto/into the goggles. Alternatively, users can also access the metaverse through so-called public terminals, located as booths.

Public access to the imagined Metaverse (i.e., for those unwilling or unable to pay GMPG) is restricted by being low-quality and limited to black-and-white projections.

A multi-dimensional, multi-horse race

It effectively took 70 years for Gould's fictional invention to evolve into a reality. Indeed, his original concept has long been surpassed in terms of concept and functionality. He died in 1985, so he never witnessed even the digital watch.

It has been 30 years since the emergence of Stephenson's fictional Metaverse, yet - perhaps thanks to Moore's Law - the infrastructure and technology for a "real" Metaverse are now effectively in place.

Instead of Seiko and Casio, the battle for supremacy is a multi-horse race. The big four contenders are Google, Meta, Microsoft and (most likely) Apple. However, just as the race to create Dick Tracy's watch was neither a radio manufacturer nor a watchmaker, it is possible that the ultimate creator of what ultimately becomes the Metaverse also comes out of left field.

Will it be a gaming giant? Will it be a media company? Or will Apple once again take the crown? Right now, it's anyone's guess.

But right now, one thing is certain: the Metaverse's time has most definitely come. And the world will never be the same again.

This is the first article in a newsletter dedicated to musings, insights, observations and pondering about the putative Metaverse. Please SUBSCRIBE for future articles and interviews by the author.

Jesse Karjalainen is a communication and content specialist, as well as an award-winning journalist, author, writer, photographer, designer and illustrator. He lives in Sweden.