The metaverse has very quickly found itself a topic of discussion by the world’s most influential newspapers, companies and governments. Facebook attracted headlines and derision in November 2021 when it rebranded as Meta, an acknowledgement of the centrality of metaverse services in its future. The only problem is that the metaverse does not yet exist, and no one is quite agreed about what it is.
Venture capitalist Matthew Ball has been influential in shaping what we expect from the metaverse. He posits in the first part of ‘The Metaverse And How it Will Revolutionize Everything’ (WW Norton, £22, ISBN 9781324092032) that the metaverse is the next phase of the internet. Or, to be more precise: “a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds that can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity...