Metaverse is a speculative future iteration of the Internet part of shared virtual reality, often as a form of social media. The metaverse in a broader sense may not only refer to virtual worlds operated by social media companies but the entire spectrum of augmented reality. The term arose in the early 1990s, and has come to be criticised as a method of public relations building using a purely speculative yet still "over-hyped" concept based on existing technology.

History

The term was coined in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world. Stephenson used the term to describe a virtual reality-based successor to the Internet. Concepts similar to the Metaverse have appeared under a variety of names in the cyberpunk genre of fiction as far back as 1981 in the Vernor Vinge's novella True Names. Stephenson stated in the afterword to Snow Crash that after finishing the novel he learned about Habitat, an early MMORPG which resembled the Metaverse.

The concept cyberspace, which first appeared in the short story 'Burning Chrome' by William Gibson (Omni, July 1982), was a central theme in his 1984 groundbreaking novel, Neuromancer. The Metaverse is distinct from "the more inclusive concept of cyberspace that reflects the totality of shared online space across all dimensions of representation" Unlike, for instance, in the fictional concept introduced in Neuromancer, which was typified by a Cartesian separation of body and mind, the Metaverse allows its users to access its environs while still aware of their world.[9] This is demonstrated in a technology called invisible to visible (I2V) that Nissan is developing, which overlays a car's windshield with virtual information as well as features that include an ability to summon an in-car 3D avatar.

Since many massively multiplayer online games share features with the Metaverse but provide access only to non-persistent instances that are shared by up to several dozen players, the concept of multiverse virtual games has been used to distinguish them from the Metaverse.

In 2021, the social media company Facebook changed its name to Meta to reflect its new focus on building technologies that "bring the metaverse to life." Its version of the metaverse is described as "an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it."