I might be breaking a bit of a taboo here; but sometimes I wonder if people, outside of a small very niche group, actually even want something like a metaverse.
I do, but for socializing, not for business.
The Metaverse, as a concept, is pre-web. Snow Crash was written by a man who had never used the web, whose experience of "online" was Compuserve and Delphi, where you were logged in to one place at a time, over one connection, and interacting with one application. So standing there in virtual reality and being in one place and doing one thing and interacting with one entity at a time was natural.
Personal computers, too, were single tasking. Apple had just recently introduced Multifinder but it was not really like a real multitasking desktop. Windows 3 had just come out and good Windows multitasking meant OS.2 or NT and they were really niche applications. Windows 3.11 would come out in 1993 and it would suck less, but it was still laggy. The only good multitasking desktop that had been out for any length of time was the Amiga and Amiga users were struggling to express how much a difference this made.
Snow Crash came out in 1992, so it was written in 1990 and 1991. Right before the web and a few years before good multitasking desktops and being able to bash browser windows around like sheets of paper.
But over the next decade, everything changed. By 2002 Windows XP had been out for a year, the first versions of OS X were available, and there were several good web browsers and the web was exploding.
Now when you're working, not playing, working online you're not stuck in one place the way VR forces you to be. You're bringing together information from multiple applications and websites, taking pictures on your phone and just expectingthem to be in
~/Dropbox/Camera Uploads/ or wherever equivalent location your cloud service of choice puts them on your computer. It all just works.
You're everywhere.
The Metaverse doesn't let you do that. VR is about the opposite of being everywhere, it's about being in a place. In Science Fiction the only effective MODERN metaverses work hand in hand with a posthuman gestalt where you literally copy your uploaded self and send multiple of yourself off to do different things and merge yourself afterwards, like in Linda Nagata's
Vast and Michael Swanwick's
Stations of the Tide.
The single threaded real world metaverse is mundane, boring, a decades old science fictional staple of holodecks and videogames. And people want it, yes, but not as a place to work. Selling it as the office of the future is so 1992 it's leaking Wayne's World all over the carpet.
arstechnica.com
