
In fact, it brings us to the biggest problem with “the metaverse.” This seems cool, but it's not advertising a real product or even a possible future one. She's able to make eye contact with her friend who is physically there, they're both able to hear the concert, and they can see floating text hovering above the stage. The video then cuts to the concert, where the woman appears in an Avengers-style hologram. At one point during Meta's original presentation on the metaverse, the company showed a scenario in which a young woman is sitting on her couch scrolling through Instagram when she sees a video a friend has posted of a concert that's happening halfway across the world.

This stands in relatively grounded contrast with other companies' visions of the future, which range from optimistic to outright fan fiction. While it remains to be seen whether this kind of interface will catch on, Apple is explicitly distancing itself from the kind of rhetoric that aligns with *Ready Player One–*style immersion in a virtual world. Its key distinguishing factor is a screen that can be adjusted to make the real world visible with apps visible as an overlay.
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Notably, Apple has thrown its hat into the ring of augmented reality computing, but without ever once saying the word “metaverse.” The company's new Vision Pro headset is pitched as a “spatial computing” platform, working similar to how you might expect a Mac or iPad to work, except with AR-powered apps. Microsoft seems to think it could involve virtual meeting rooms to train new hires or chat with your remote coworkers. Meta thinks it will include fake houses you can invite all your friends to hang out in. And we know which companies are investing in the idea, but there's nothing approaching agreement on what it is. We have a vague sense of what things currently exist that we could kind of call the metaverse if we massage the definition of words the right way. It's at this point that most discussions of what the metaverse entails start to stall. Now many companies or advocates instead refer to any single game or platform as “ a metaverse.” By this definition, anything from a VR concert app to a video game would count as a “metaverse.” Some take it further, calling the collection of various metaverses a “ multiverse of metaverses.” Or maybe we're living in a “ hybrid-verse.” This inconvenient fact has given rise to slightly different terminology. That is in part because such a world requires companies to cooperate in a way that simply isn't profitable or desirable- Fortnite doesn't have much motivation to give players a portal to jump straight over to World of Warcraft, even if it were easy to do so, for example-and partially because the raw computing power needed for such a concept could be much further away than we think. There are tangible and exciting developments in the realm of building digital worlds.ĭespite this, the idea of a Ready Player One-like single unified place called “ the metaverse" is still largely impossible. And while Unreal may be a video game platform, it's also being used in the film industry and could make it easier for anyone to create virtual experiences.

Many other large companies, including Nvidia, Unity, Roblox, and even 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.įor example, Epic has acquired a number of companies that help create or distribute digital assets, in part to bolster its powerful Unreal Engine 5 platform. Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are working on building tech related to interacting with virtual worlds, but they're not the only ones.

Saying that Fortnite is “the metaverse” would be a bit like saying Google is “the internet.” Even if you spend large chunks of time in Fortnite, socializing, buying things, learning, and playing games, that doesn't necessarily mean it encompasses the entire scope of what people and companies mean when they say "the metaverse." Just as Google, which builds parts of the internet-from physical data centers to security layers-isn't the entire internet.
