IT WAS the “selfie” mocked around the world. In the foreground was a smooth-faced digital puppet ostensibly representing Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta ( formerly known as Facebook).
In the background was a miniature Eiffel Tower and some crudely rendered spherical bushes. Did Meta really spend $10 billion (R180bn) last year to bring this to fruition?
The image, taken inside Meta’s flagship virtual reality (VR) app, Horizon Worlds, and posted on Instagram in September, wasn’t a strong omen for Zuckerberg’s hopes of building “the metaverse”. Even Zuckerberg himself would later admit it was “pretty basic”. Still, having bet his company’s entire identity on the concept and declared it his mission to “bring the metaverse to life”, the 38-year-old tech baron isn’t about to back down.
Silicon Valley has metaverse fever. According to a recent report by McKinsey, companies invested more than $120bn (R2,1 trillion) in metaverse-related technology and infrastructure in the first five months of 2022.
Investment bank Citi predicts the metaverse could be worth up to $13trn (R234trn) by 2030.
But what is the metaverse?
The term was coined by Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, referring to an all-consuming digital world that could kill you if you downloaded the wrong file.
Advocates imagine it as something like the next stage of the web, based not around flat pages and social media feeds, but on 3D virtual worlds. Zuckerberg called it “an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content – you are in it”.
VR, which uses special goggles to put you “inside” a virtual world, is central to Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse, along with augmented reality (AR).
AR uses a similar headset to layer virtual objects onto the wearer’s view of the physical world, meaning, for example, you could look at
