THE METAVERSE IS ALREADY HERE
IT’S FAIR TO say that reality has a lot of problems. War. Famine. Disease. Taxes. Unwanted accumulations of pet hair. But if you look at the world through the eyes of some of the world’s biggest tech companies, a deeper, more fundamental problem reveals itself: There just aren’t enough holograms.
From the earliest days of the modern technology revolution—the postwar rise of computers and connections that would eventually give us the internet and email and iPhones and Farm ville—technologists and sci-fi writers have dreamed of a world with holograms: information and three-dimensional virtual objects floating in space around you, or entirely new spaces out of the digital ether that you can explore and interact with.
This was a multidisciplinary head-scratcher. It’s easy to think of holograms as just an advanced display technology, like televisions and computer monitors. But it goes much deeper than that. To interact seamlessly with objects in three-dimensional space, even in the simplest way—say, turning your head to look at something from a different angle—requires the display not only to acquire information about the physical properties of your environment but to track what you are seeing and how, and then adapt accordingly.
The same is true of sound, which varies subtly based on factors such as the mass and texture of objects in your room as well as the tilt and location of your head. Your eyes and ears are sensors, detecting a vast amount of information about the world around you, which your brain then decodes, processes, and synthesizes in real time. Add touch, and the sensory measurement challenges grow broader still. To create a world rich with virtual interaction, you’d need technology to track and measure the breadth of human perception.
In a way, this is a philosophical problem as much as a technological challenge. What does it mean to see, hear, touch, connect, communicate—to interact with the reality around us? What even is the nature of reality? What even is, like, existence, man? Feel free to take copious bong rips before proceeding.
In any case, we don’t yet have this sort of hologram. But in October 2021, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was committed to solving the hologram problem once and for all.
He didn’t call it the hologram problem, because no one calls it that. Instead, he said that Facebook—the social-media behemoth that in two decades has gone from a website where you could post party photos and use a “poke” button on your college crush to a sprawling and controversial cultural-political online ecosystem, widely viewed as both a radical threat to democracy and a good place to sell an old couch—was going to devote its considerable resources to building something called the metaverse, and would change its corporate name to Meta.
In a lengthy presentation that doubled as a demo reel of products, some coming soon, others hypothetical, Zuckerberg showed off his company’s vision for the metaverse, a network of virtual and quasi-virtual places to work, play, buy, sell, build businesses, and connect with friends. There would be video games and meetings and workouts and
