What Is the Metaverse?

What Is the Metaverse?

Although some might have heard the term “metaverse” only recently, it’s been in use for a couple of decades. It was first used in the 1990s in a work of fiction, and it usually describes a hypothetical future version of the internet that exists alongside reality as a shared persistent virtual world.

For a long time, both fiction writers and technologists have envisioned the metaverse as the evolution of the internet. And, while some of the attempts at building anything resembling the metaverse failed, they did set a precedent.

So, what is the metaverse?

Etymology and Origin of the Term “Metaverse” and Its Concept

The word “metaverse” was created by putting together the Greek prefix “meta,” which means beyond, and the stem “verse,” a backformation from the word “universe.” The term first appeared in Snow Crash, a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, in 1992.

However, the concept to which metaverse refers had already been somewhat depicted under a different term: “cyberspace.” The concept first appeared under this term in William Gibson’s story Burning Chrome in 1982 but was popularized by his 1984 novel, Neuromancer.

In Neuromancer, Gibson describes his cyberspace as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation . . . a graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.”

Nonetheless, after the arrival of the World Wide Web, people started to use the term cyberspace as a synonym of the internet in its present state. By the time Stephenson’s Snow Crash hit the shelves, the term “metaverse” caught on, and common use established it as the concept’s signifier.

Power Tools add-on for Google Sheets, 12-month subscription