Dear Media, Evangelists, Critics: Yes, There Is an Official Definition of the Metaverse & It Already Exists (Basically)

Update, 2/12: Bumped up for weekend conversation!

With so many definitions of the Metaverse swirling around, and some even asserting that there is no agreed upon definition, I did something totally radical: Went back to Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, found all the novel’s references to the Metaverse, and created a definition that’s based directly on those passages.

Distilled to under 300 characters (so that it might be more easily tweeted), here is a definition that captures as much as possible Stephenson's original conception:

The Metaverse is a vast, immersive virtual world simultaneously accessible by millions of users through VR and other devices, highly customizable avatars and powerful experience creation tools. It is integrated with the real world economy and compatible with external technology.

I first read Snowcrash decades ago. Coming back to it now, I’m struck by how highly specific it is about what the Metaverse is, and how it operates -- up to and including specs on its size, how its virtual real estate is managed, and so on (and on, and on). Stephenson’s conception of the Metaverse has more specificity than many actual Silicon Valley pitch decks I’ve read.

So it’s not just the term “Metaverse” that came from Snowcrash, but the whole concept. It’s rather strange that so many reporters and analysts have declared that the Metaverse is a mysterious idea no one quite knows about, or that it doesn't exist, when its original conception -- from an actual famous, influential, acclaimed novel --  is laid out in great detail. 

What’s more, the Metaverse from Snowcrash very much has a direct relation to the technology that companies have been building for decades. It’s why Oculus’ Chief Science Officer once announced -- nearly a decade ago -- that they were creating "The Path to the Metaverse"; it’s why Linden Lab’s founders referenced it when evolving early versions of Second Life. For that matter, Stephenson himself acknowledges that Meta and other companies are trying to build his original concept; he even has opinions about how the Metaverse should evolve in the real world. 

Related to that -- and this is even more key -- Stephenson’s Metaverse resembles many platforms that exist right now, both in their technical functionality, and how they operate on an experiential level. 

Let us turn, dearly beloved, to the original text from whence our definition came:

The Metaverse is accessed through VR:

[Hiro’s] in a computer generated universe that his computer is drawing onto  his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the  lingo, this  imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of  time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out  of the U-Stor-It…

But it is also accessible through other devices:

A  liberal sprinkling of black-and-white people-persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public  terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black  and white. 

It is a vast virtual world: 

Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse… The Street seems to be a grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than Earth.

It is accessed by millions of users at the same time:

In the real world - planet Earth, Reality - there are somewhere between six and ten billion people… That makes for about sixty million people who can [afford computing technology to] be on the Street [of the Metaverse]  at  any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can't really afford it but  go there anyway, by using public  machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer, and at any given time  the  Street  is occupied by twice the population of New York City. [I.E. About 15 million people when the novel was written in the 90s - WJA]

It has highly customizable avatars:

Your avatar can look any way you  want it  to, up to the limitations of your equipment.  If you're  ugly,  you can make your  avatar  beautiful.  If you've just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still  be  wearing  beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look  like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse.

It has powerful experience creation tools: 

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.

It is integrated with the real world economy:

"Hiro, I can't understand why you're holding out on me. We're making bucks here -- Kongbucks and yen - and we can be flexible on pay and bennies. We're putting together a swords-and-sorcery thing,and we can use a hacker with your skills. Come on down and talk to me, okay?"

… When Hiro's father died, he cashed in all of his Black Sun [Metaverse club] stock to put Mom in a nice community in Korea. She loves it there. Goes golfing every day. He could have kept his money in The Black Sun and made ten million dollars about a year  later when it  went public, but his mother would have been a street person. So when his mother visits him in the Metaverse, looking tan and happy in her golfing duds, Hiro views that as his personal fortune.  

It is compatible with external technology -- such as a VOIP-controlled vehicle, piloted from within the Metaverse:

Each of the little TV monitors is showing a different view out his van: windshield, left window,  right window, rearview.  Another one has an electronic map showing his position: inbound on the San Bernardino, not far away. "The van is under voice command,"  [Ng] explains. "... This is why I will sometimes make unfamiliar sounds with  my voice - I am controlling the vehicle's systems."   

Several existing, successful platforms -- ROBLOX, Fornite Creative, and so on -- have nearly all of these features. Some platforms arguably have all of them, including the last aspect, bridging the Metaverse to real world devices -- there have been many fun experiments connecting virtual worlds to real world technology devices in just Second Life alone. (But here's a recent cool example using WebXR.) 

Even more striking, existing platforms are already starting to surpass Stephenson’s original vision in some ways. In the 1990s, Neal pictured 15 million concurrent Metaverse users out of a global population of some 6-10 billion. With nearly 8 billion people in the world now, ROBLOX alone had a record peak CCU of nearly 7 million; in aggregate, the leading Metaverse-type platforms have a combined peak CCU approaching 20 million.

The Metaverse has a clear definition, it exists now in a rough, initial form across several platforms -- many of which were directly inspired by the novel. We may quibble about some of the essential features, but it seems strange to pretend the concept is unclear when it's laid out so plainly in a major book.

I mean: Why even use the original term at all, unless we’re also going to reference all the original details that went along with it? 

Comments

[seph]

Al Gore had it pretty correct with "information super highway", even predicted and pushed for fiber everywhere in the 80s...but how useful is it to credit the definition of the internet to Al Gore or stay confined within both his broad and thin definitions of the internet? To constantly reference back to him when something new happens with the internet?

"Metaverse" will probably end up as useful a term as "cyberspace" or "world wide web" or the aforementioned "information super highway". Neat sounding words that get forgotten as individual products and services become bigger than any encompassing definition.

We'll get to a point something is more interesting than the buzzword metaverse, just like Youtube became bigger than video, Facebook than social network, WoW than MMO, Minecraft than sandbox, etc.

[MyCCPay]

I recently saw the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson in a Little Free Library. I read the back, curious, noticed that the main character's name was Hiro Protagonist, and immediately laughed out loud, disturbing a squirrel.

[sirhc desantis]

If I admit that to this day I have never read 'Snow Crash' do I retroactively get kicked out of SL? (Sorry - Gibson fan)

[Kat Prawl a.k.a. Kat Lemieux]

Thoughtful, well-sourced and of course well-written. I'll be linking to this article often in discussions about the metaverse.

[Wagner James Au]

Thank you!

[LTDCommodities]

I read the back, curious, noticed that the main character's name was Hiro Protagonist, and immediately laughed out loud, disturbing a squirrel.