Metaverse

An avatar in the virtual world Second Life, an example of a metaverse-style online virtual world.

Introduction

The Metaverse is a collective virtual reality (VR) created by the author Neal Stephenson, in his 1992 sci-fi classic Snow Crash. In this global-spanning virtual world, billions of users could socialize (e.g. hanging out in 3D bars and nightclubs), meet people, and do business. People could also play games in the Metaverse, although this was not its main goal. The concept of the Metaverse rapidly gained popularity after the novel's release, and has influenced various personalities in the virtual reality and gaming industries .

In her 2012 master's thesis on the novel, Monica Sedore describes Snow Crash as depicting a posthuman world in which many of its inhabitants have a second existence in an Internet-like network called the Metaverse. This internet-like network is mostly populated by real people who use an avatar as a form of personal representation in the virtual space. The digital world is envisioned as a large cyber-planet containing buildings and structures that are found in reality, and others that are not. There are also synthetic characters that inhabit the Metaverse. These vary in capability and complexity, and they interact with the real people in the virtual space like they were avatars of other real characters .

In the novel, users enter the Metaverse by way of a virtual reality headset that wraps halfway around the head; the headset has small earphones that plug into the users' ears. Stephenson describes the view inside the goggles: they "throw a light, smoky haze across his eyes and reflect a distorted wide-angle view of a brilliantly lit boulevard that stretches off into an infinite blackness. This boulevard does not really exist; it is a computer-rendered view of an imaginary place." Sedore quotes this passage from page 20 of a 1997 Bantam edition of the novel.

The story's main character is named Hiro Protagonist. He is a young man - a computer hacker by profession - that spends the majority of his time goggled into the Metaverse in order to escape from the harshness of reality .

Influence of the Metaverse concept

The concept of the Metaverse has had a great impact in the digital technology industry for the past decades. Indeed, Michael Abrash (Chief Scientist at Oculus VR) credits the book for the desire to bring that concept into the real world. Abrash partnered with John Carmack to develop the first online multiplayer shooter - Quake. They where trying, in a small way, to fulfill the vision of the Metaverse they had read about .

Others, like Jaron Lanier (Computer Scientist), used the concept of the Metaverse to try and popularize the VR technology of the time, which was primitive compared to today's standards. For many years, the VR technology seemed ill-fated, but it seems to be finally reaching a developmental level that can rekindle the hopes and promises of the virtual reality dreams of technologists inspired by the Metaverse. With the release of headsets like the Oculus Rift, VR has reached the general public, and the technology seems to be a growth area as big as smartphones were in 2007 . This virtual reality renaissance is creating a lot of excitement surrounding the eventual development of a real world Metaverse. Rod Furlan, in a 2015 piece for Singularity Hub, wrote that "While the term "metaverse" was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, current usage has diverged significantly from its original meaning. In popular contemporary culture, the metaverse is often described as the VR-based successor to the web." While there is little consensus on what a real world implementation of the Metaverse would be like, the concept is a persistent topic in discussions about the future of VR .

Developing a real world Metaverse

In March 2017, Virtuleap co-founder Amir Bozorgzadeh wrote in VentureBeat that WebVR provided the building blocks for what developers were calling the Metaverse, which he described as an "interconnected virtual world where users can travel from one immersive experience to the next, like walking through an infinite series of doors that take you through an endlessly growing virtual universe."

WebVR was a JavaScript API for virtual reality in web browsers, developed in the WebVR Community Group; the editors of its 1.1 specification came from Mozilla and Google. In an April 2017 follow-up, Bozorgzadeh wrote that WebVR could deliver immersive online experiences without downloads or installs, described it as the missing link for the next iteration of the Internet, and pointed to the "immersive web" being pushed by Google, Oculus, Samsung and Microsoft. At the time, Oculus was building Carmel, its own WebVR browser.

The April article also described a debate about how the Metaverse should be built. Bozorgzadeh wrote that Tim Sweeney believed game engines would be the platforms for building it, while Bozorgzadeh himself argued that the concept went beyond the capacity of game engines. He quoted WebVR developer and Mozilla A-Frame contributor Fabien Benetou: "No platform can be the Metaverse; it can only be a protocol supported by multiple platforms from different vendors."

WebVR itself did not become a standard. It was never ratified, its development halted, and it was deprecated in favor of the WebXR Device API, which first shipped in browsers in 2019 (including Google Chrome 79). The WebXR Device API is developed by the W3C Immersive Web Working Group; as of October 2026 its latest published version is a W3C Candidate Recommendation Draft dated 9 June 2026.

Social presence is another part of the concept. In a talk at the VRX virtual reality conference in San Francisco in December 2016, Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, said that the social part of the Metaverse was important. GamesBeat reported that, in this view, capturing facial expressions accurately would make communicating in the virtual world as good as it can be in the real world.

Sweeney said, "We are not more than several years away from having a human that is not that much different from reality." According to GamesBeat, graphics technology had improved 100,000 times in the previous twenty years, making realistic avatars and simulated digital characters possible. Sweeney saw the beginning of a shared social environment in Oculus' Toy Box demo, in which users play with toys together in the same virtual reality room using avatars and touch controls: "The Oculus toy box is the beginning of a social experience. That's the first step. The next step is to have outward facing cameras and inward-facing cameras that pick up the movements of your face."

Furlan's five tenets

In 2015, Rod Furlan - an artificial intelligence researcher and co-founder of Lucidscape - shared five tenets for an "ideal" implementation of the Metaverse. These were:

1.Creative freedom is not negotiable;

2.Technological freedom is not negotiable either;

3.Dismantle the wall between creators and users;

4.Support for worlds of unprecedented scale;

5.Support for nomadic computation.

The first tenet expresses his opinion that creativity is essential for the development of content for a real world Metaverse. He writes that "censorship inevitably stifles creativity" and that "Content creators are encouraged to explore the full spectrum of possible human experiences without the fear of censorship. Each world is a sovereign space that is entirely determined and controlled by its owner-creator."

The second tenet proposes that the ideal foundation for the Metaverse is based on free software and open standards. It is essential to enforce the right to creative freedom and protect the network from single-source solutions, attempts of control by litigation, or abuse by its own developers .

In the third tenet, the author suggests that creative and technological freedom are not sufficient to assure an inclusive Metaverse if only a small portion of the users contribute to it. He explains that "It is also necessary to break the wall that separates content creators from consumers by providing not only the means but also the incentives necessary to make each and every user a co-author in the metaverse network." This could mean that all aspects of the user experience would be an invitation to learn, create, or remix .

The fourth tenet addresses the fact that while today's virtual worlds can only handle smaller-scale simulations with a limited number of participants, the simulation infrastructure of the ideal Metaverse would need to support enormous worlds and millions of simultaneous users with the same virtual space .

In the final tenet, Furlan suggests that in "The same way that the web required a new way of thinking about information, the ideal metaverse requires a new way of thinking about computation. One of the ways this requirement manifests itself is by our proposal for the support of safe nomadic computation." A nomadic program is an autonomous participant with similar "rights" of a human user. These programs can move from one server to the next without meaningful distinction between human operators and nomadic programs. They would carry their source code and internal state as they migrate between servers, and interact with users or improve the worlds visited .

In GamesBeat's account of Sweeney's December 2016 VRX talk, the Metaverse would be a place for e-commerce that would affect all aspects of life, and it would also carry the ills of the real world, such as crime and harassment. Sweeney said, "This virtual economy might exceed the real economy some day, and it could be a utopia or dystopia when we think about it," and, "This Metaverse is going to be far more pervasive and powerful than anything else." He argued that it should be built as an open protocol that anyone can implement rather than controlled by a single company.