The author who coined the term “Metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash wrote a post commenting on the latest news out of Meta.
I encourage you to read the whole thing, titled “My Prodigal Brainchild”, and then come back here as I pick apart some of the specifics where we agree and disagree.
There’s this:
When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.
Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces. Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible.
There’s a lot to both agree and disagree with here. I agree that we will still have our hand terminals in 20 years, but there’s also a terrible assumption inherent to people promoting ideas like AR and XR and the Metaverse, and that’s the idea that headsets are to be worn 24/7 in public spaces.
