At Facebook Connect, Mark Zuckerberg announced the renaming of the Facebook parent company as “Meta” and his vision for the “Metaverse”, a term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. CNET has assembled a compilation of various segments describing how a mature system might look.
This is a different compilation, with some duplication, that discusses the name change and goes into more detail about human interface device development.
What is missing from Zuckerberg's “vision”. Well, his “metaverse” doesn't seem to have the ubiquitous, intrusive, and unavoidable advertising which pollute all of his other platforms—what do you think the odds are it won't be even more horrific in an immersive three-dimensional virtual world. And then there's the snooping, data-mining, censorship, indoctrination, and cancellation of people for wrong-think. Just imagine how much more power the operators of the metaverse will have when they can ban individuals or organisations from this unified means of social interaction and commerce. I'll bet the reality looks more like that imagined by Keiichi Matsuda in his short film “Hyper-Reality”, which I featured here back on 2021-10-01, but is worth another view in the context of the Facebook/Meta announcement.
It has been thirty-three years since my 1988 paper, “Through the Looking Glass: Beyond ‘User Interfaces’ ”. Here is the logo I introduced in that article.
