A Facebook logo is displayed on a smartphone in this illustration taken January 6, 2020. REUTERS FILE PHOTO
PARIS — Imagine a world where you could sit on the same couch as a friend who lives thousands of miles away, or conjure up a virtual version of your workplace while at the beach.
Welcome to the : a vision of the future that sounds fantastical, but which tech titans like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are betting on as the next great leap in the evolution of the internet.
The metaverse is, in fact, the stuff of science-fiction: the term was coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash”, in which people don virtual reality headsets to interact inside a game-like digital world.
The book has long enjoyed cult status among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — but in recent months the metaverse has become one of the tech sector’s hottest buzzwords, with companies pouring millions of dollars into its development.
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Facebook fueled the excitement further Monday by announcing the creation of a new team to work on Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse.
“This is going to be a really big part of the next chapter for the technology industry,” Zuckerberg told tech website The Verge last week. Over the next five years, he predicted, Facebook would transition from “primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company”.