What Is the Metaverse, Exactly?

The metaverse, a term coined by CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella, refers to the future of the internet, video games, or even a worse version of Zoom. It has been a year and a half since Facebook announced its rebranding to Meta, and the term has eroded into near meaninglessness. Meta is building a VR social platform, Roblox is facilitating user-generated video games, and some companies are offering up broken game worlds with NFTs attached. Advocates argue that this lack of coherence is because the metaverse is still being built and it's too new to define what it means.

The technologies companies refer to when they talk about "the metaverse" can include virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), but it doesn't require that those spaces be exclusively accessed via VR or AR. Virtual worlds, such as Fortnite, can be accessed through PCs, game consoles, and phones. Many companies that have hopped on board the metaverse bandwagon also envision some sort of new digital economy, where users can create, buy, and sell goods.

Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are working on building tech related to interacting with virtual worlds, but many other large companies, including Nvidia, Unity, Roblox, and Snap, as well as a variety of smaller companies and startups, are building the infrastructure to create better virtual worlds that more closely mimic our physical life.

The idea of a Ready Player One-like single unified place called "the metaverse" is still largely impossible due to the need for companies to cooperate in a way that isn't profitable or desirable. Some companies or advocates now refer to any single game or platform as "a metaverse," while others take it further, calling the collection of various metaverses a "multiverse of metaverses."

Apple has introduced its Vision Pro headset as a "spatial computing" platform, similar to a Mac or iPad, but with AR-powered apps. The key distinguishing factor is a screen that can be adjusted to make the real world visible with apps visible as an overlay. This stands in relatively grounded contrast with other companies' visions of the future, which range from optimistic to outright fan fiction.

The metaverse involves holograms, which are not advertising a real product or even a possible future one. The internet first arrived with technological innovations like the ability to let computers talk over great distances and hyperlink from one web page to another. With the metaverse, there are new building blocks in place, such as the ability to host hundreds of people in a single instance of a server and motion-tracking tools that can distinguish where a person is looking or where their hands are.

Tech companies like Microsoft and Meta often gloss over how people will interact with the metaverse, such as VR headsets being clunky and the accessibility challenges of VR. Apple's Vision Pro "solves" the problem of users who have to wear glasses by selling prescription lens add-ons.

This kind of glossing over reality occurs frequently in video demos of how the metaverse could work, raising more questions than it answers. To a limited extent, this is fine, as tech giants and startups like Microsoft and Meta try to give an artistic impression of what the future could be without necessarily accounting for every technical question.

The confusion and disappointment surrounding most "metaverse" projects are so pervasive that it is hard to pinpoint which aspects of the various visions of the metaverse will actually be real one day. If VR and AR headsets become comfortable and cheap enough for people to wear on a daily basis, a virtual poker game with friends as robots and holograms and floating in space could be somewhat close to reality.