Have you heard of “metaverse” lately? It has been difficult not to.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned 16 times the latest fashion word in technology in his company’s most recent earnings call last month. The future of Facebook, he said, is a metaverse: a virtual environment where you can be physically present to hang out, play, work and create.
But he did not coin the term. Technology companies ranging from Intel Corp. even Unity Software talked about the metaverse last year. And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discussed the “business metaverse” in her company’s earnings launch last month, a day before the Facebook call.
Nvidia has been an especially strong proponent of the idea. Last year, the company launched a platform called Omniverse “to connect 3D worlds in a shared virtual universe.” CEO Jensen Huang used the company’s largest annual conference in October to publicly accredit Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel, “Snow Crash,” as the original inspiration for the successor concept. of virtual reality on the Internet, noting that “the metaverse is coming.”
So much so that, in an interview for a 2017 article about his novel, Mr. Stephenson told Vanity Fair that he was “just inventing.” Decades after the book was published, technology leaders take their ideas more seriously than ever.