Apple Goes from "Spatial Reality" with Vision Pro to "Cyberspace" in Apple TV+ Adaptation of Neuromancer

Above: Cyberspace as depicted in the Robert Longo/Keanu Reeves adaptation of William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic (via GNDN) 

Key problem with the term "Metaverse": While thousands of technologists and game developers have read Snow Crash, the novel wasn't a crossover sci-fi bestseller like, say, Frank Herbert's Dune.  Hence the last four years of reporters and tech evangelists floundering around for a definition, and then not bothering to read the book (though it's a fun, ripping yarn!). pulling a definition more or less out of thin air. As I just wrote in my own book, it may take Hollywood to first turn Snow Crash into a movie or TV show, before the term and its very specific definition catches on in the mass market.

Which brings us to William Gibson's Neuromancer, which we just learned per Variety is becoming an Apple TV+ series:

Apple TV+ has ordered a series adaptation of the William Gibson novel “Neuromancer,” Variety has learned. The 10-episode series hails from co-creators Graham Roland and JD Dillard. Roland will also serve as showrunner, while Dillard will direct the pilot. Skydance Television will co-produce with Anonymous Content.

Per the official logline, the series “will follow a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.”

Notably absent from the Variety story -- Neuromancer is also where we get the term "cyberspace" and people wearing headsets to do supercool stuff in it:

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...”

The term has fallen out of popularity since the dot com boom/bust, but as it happens, Apple has been promoting a similar term with its Vision Pro launch -- spatial reality.

As we see from slow forecasted sales, it will be challenging for even Apple to grow an actual mass market for Spatial Computing with the Vision Pro.

But then... what if Apple helped indirectly promote the Vision Pro and "Spatial Computing" with a supercool cyberpunk series featuring hackers in head-mounted displays in "cyberspace"? They certainly have the money to make it a big budget production, given Apple just up and canceled its plans to make a car.

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Comments

[Antonio]

I honestly wonder if this blog as no word to say about all this Patch Linden big mess...

[sirhc desantis]

Hmm mixed feelings on this. I am possibly the only SLer of a certain vintage who had never heard of SC before joining (and to this day have no intention of reading it) - at least that is how it seems sometimes. Picked up enough to be aware of who Hugo Proctologist was though, possibly by osmosis. I may have slightly misheard the name.
But was an avid Gibson fan and that is the m word I have been waiting for - current tech is nowhere near that so not holding my breath. This could be fun if its going to expand to the whole Sprawl World (now that would be a theme park for the whole family). Now I admit I even found the Johnny Keanu film a fun watch so not hard to please me really.
But its on Apple telly so will probably never get to see it.

(as to that 'other story' - not with a 10m pole)