In this novel, he talked about a dystopian world, a world where real-life has been destroyed the outdoors wasn’t livable for humans anymore, so everyone lives confined to their buildings and rooms, and spends their life in virtual reality. That virtual reality, the artificial world, was referred to as Metaverse by him. After this, a game was released in 2003 called the Second Life.
You could play this game on the computer, and create a second life in this game on the computer. Meeting people virtually, buying items, buying properties in the game, exchanging goods and services, and creating realistic looking avatars. By the way, an interesting fact here, the word Avatar, was first popularised in the 1992 book Snow Crash. This word comes from the Hindi/Sanskrit word Avtar, when we call someone a reincarnation of a deity.
Similarly, the word Avatar was used here for the characters in the virtual reality that you could create. They’d be your Avatars. Like this 3-D animation of Mark Zuckerberg created by him, this 3D character is the Avatar of Mark Zuckerberg. Obviously, this word became more popular in the rest of the world with the release of the 2009 film Avatar. Recently though, many companies tried to create their virtual worlds and Metaverses, but this word was made popular again by Facebook.
When Facebook decided to change the name of their company to Meta. Saying that they want to adopt the Metaverse. That they want to expand from being a social media company to a Metaverse company. And Mark Zuckerberg defined the Metaverse in this manner. “And you’re gonna be able to do almost anything you can imagine. Get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create, as well as entirely new categories that don’t really fit how we think about computers and phones today. If it were up to Mark, he would’ve said that you could eat and have bodily functions in the Metaverse itself.
