So is the metaverse the next big advance that will revolutionize the way we all connect with each other? Is it just a repackaging of existing technologies into a new catch-all concept? Or is it just the latest buzzword marketing term? 'Mark Zuckerberg has decided that now is the time to build the metaverse, so enormous wheels are turning and resources are flowing and the effort is definitely going to be made.' 'But here we are,' as Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack recently put it.

These efforts to create 'the metaverse' have included numerous online games and gathering places that captured some of the metaverse's most important concepts without ever using the term. While Meta's rebranding drives most of the metaverse conversation these days, the nearly 30 years since Snow Crash appeared have seen plenty of online networks that embody some or most of what Stephenson's book describes. But Stephenson has made it abundantly clear that 'there has been zero communication between me and FB & no biz relationship.' That means Facebook's interpretation of 'the metaverse' might end up being quite different from what Stephenson originally described. Meta (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues mentioned the word 'metaverse' 80+ times in under 90 minutes during last week's Facebook Connect keynote presentation, where the company announced its new name. In it, developers can 'build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.' In the book, the Metaverse (always capitalized in Stephenson's fiction) is a shared 'imaginary place' that's 'made available to the public over the worldwide fiber-optics network' and projected onto virtual reality goggles. The term 'metaverse' was originally coined in Neal Stephenson's seminal 1992 cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash. Enlarge / The original source of the term 'metaverse'

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