The concept of the metaverse appeared for the first time in the 90s in the hands of the American writer Neal Stephenson ( also author of ‘Criptonomicon’ or ‘Anatema’) when he described in his novel “Snow Crash” a kind of collective virtual space that it would have succeeded the Internet network and would be based on virtual reality.
There, humans use digital avatars of themselves to explore the world in order to escape the dramatic dystopian reality. It is a virtual environment that users access through terminals that project them into this virtual environment.
Currently, the term metaverse has become fashionable thanks to the creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who uses this word to define his next steps on the road to building a virtual universe that would transcend the Internet. However, it has nothing to do with Stephenson . In fact, the author publicly made it clear that he had no relationship or association with Zuckerberg regarding his term “metaverse.”
Now, as the author revealed in an interview with Wired magazine, he is working with a crypto expert to create an open metaverse platform that its creators hope will be a more decentralized version of the types of Big Tech metaverses like those run by Fortnite and Facebook.
It would be a very ambitious project technologically speaking, similar to a unified Internet. According to Stephenson, he does not intend to take a break from writing novels while developing this other metaverse, so we do not have to worry about continuing to receive his publications with the regularity to which he has accustomed us.
Reference: Wired
