Science fiction author Neal Stephenson, who coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has argued he and others who believed immersive environments would require head-mounted hardware got it wrong.
In a post penned to mark Meta’s recent decision to end its work on the Metaverse after blowing through $80 billion, Stephenson said that twenty years ago, when he worked at virtual reality hardware company Magic Leap, he would ask “Do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?”
“At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no,” he wrote. Now he thinks that another 20 years into the future, devices like smartphones will still dominate. “Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces.”
When someone holds up their phone, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles
“Maybe this should have been obvious to me given the amount of time, effort, and money people put into making their faces look as good as possible,” he ruminated.
Stephenson thinks even slimming metaverse-ready hardware down from bulky goggles to resemble conventional eyeglasses won’t work, because such devices “have the unintended side effect of making these things seem sinister.”
“When someone around you is staring at a rectangle in their hand, it might be incredibly annoying, but at least you can tell they’re doing it. When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not,” he wrote. “Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it’s creepy.”
He thinks VR headwear has become a dead end, because sales have been so low they’re a risky proposition for developers.
“No developer is going to enter the infinitesimal headset market without strong financial incentives,” he suggested. He also pointed out that when hardware-dependent platforms close, “all of the software that depended on them effectively ceases to exist.”
“Devs who spent years of their careers crafting works of interactive art have seen it all wiped out. With that kind of track record I consider it very unlikely that developers will sign on to build content for the next generation of headsets that comes along, supposing that ever happens.”
Stephenson thinks the metaverse became multiplayer gaming. “Roblox has something like 380 million monthly active users. Minecraft has something like 60 million. Fortnite has 650 million registered players,” he wrote.
He thinks Fortnite’s success shows another idea about the metaverse – that it would become a place to live out daily life – has also proven incorrect.
“It’s quite easy to get carried away thinking about how cool it would be to actually build a system that could, on an engineering level, do the things that the fictional technology is depicted as doing in the book or the movie,” he wrote. “Having built it, though, you might discover that it’s just a lot of randos milling around waiting for something to happen.”
Fortnite, he suggests, succeeds because it has a narrative.
“When you enter a play session you know in general – but not in detail – what’s going to happen, and you know that it’ll be over in about twenty minutes.”
After noting that Meta reportedly burned through $80 billion in pursuit of his 1992 vision of the metaverse, and that his opinions may therefore be worth ignoring, Stephenson suggested the successors to Fortnite will advance the concept of the metaverse.
“This is only the beginning of what will become possible in coming years,” he wrote. “Even one one-millionth of what Meta spent is enough to fund significant progress in this area if you have a small, talented, and dedicated team.”
One last thing: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly developing an agentic AI to help him do his job. ®
