To be clear, this isn't simply a stand-in for the immersive worlds of AR and VR, even though it's often being used that way. Science fiction ideas always get appropriated into tech, and it's happened with the metaverse, too. Metaverses are perhaps the clearest admission yet that the future of tech doesn't lie just in VR or AR, but in a mix of many devices accessing a shared online world, which may be more immersive and 3D than the internet you're currently using to read this story.
A VR- and AR-ready dream of bringing people into some sort of virtual universe that's as creation-friendly as a Minecraft, as popular as a Fortnite, and as useful as Zoom, Slack and Google Docs. The definition of metaverse, now, is sort of a future-forward social hub, a space where avatars can meet, an ecosystem for connected apps.
On Thursday Facebook announced it's changing its company name to Meta, to reflect its broad goals in this space but it's a term that can be applied to properties as broad as Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, VR, AR, even Animal Crossing. Over the past few years, the term metaverse has re-emerged in a very big way. How long? CNET wrote about the trend back in 2007. And the term 'metaverse' has been around for a long time.
