CG: n
CT: To hear tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Satya Nadella talk about it, the metaverse is the future of the internet. Or it’s a video game. Or maybe it’s a deeply uncomfortable, worse version of Zoom? It’s hard to say.
It’s been nearly six months since Facebook announced it was rebranding to Meta and would focus its future on the upcoming “metaverse.” In the time since, what that term means hasn’t gotten any clearer. Meta is building a VR social platform, Roblox is facilitating user-generated video games, and some companies are offering up little more than broken game worlds that happen to have NFTs attached.
Advocates from niche startups to tech giants have argued that this lack of coherence is because the metaverse is still being built, and it’s too new to define what it means. The internet existed in the 1970s, for example, but not every idea of what that would eventually look like was true.
S: Wired – https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-the-metaverse/ (last access: 9 October 2022)
N: 1. Metaverse is a portmanteau of “meta”, meaning transcendent, and “verse”, from universe. Sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash” to describe the virtual world in which the protagonist, Hiro Protagonist, socializes, shops and vanquishes real-world enemies through his avatar. The concept predates “Snow Crash” and was popularized as “cyberspace” in William Gibson’s groundbreaking 1984 novel “Neuromancer.”
2. The metaverse is a network of always-on virtual environments in which many people can interact with one another and digital objects while operating virtual representations – or avatars – of themselves. Think of a combination of immersive virtual reality, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game and the web.
3. The metaverse is a concept from science fiction that many people in the technology industry envision as the successor to today’s internet. It’s only a vision at this point, but technology companies like Facebook are aiming to make it the setting for many online activities, including work, play, studying and shopping. Facebook is so sold on the concept that it is renaming itself Meta to highlight its push to dominate the metaverse.
4. A metaverse is a three-dimensional virtual world (VW) where people interact with each other and their environment, using the metaphor of the real world but without its physical limitations.
– metaverse: data validated by Canadian subject-field experts from École Polytechnique de Montréal, MasterpieceVR and McGill University.
5. Cultural Interrelation: Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson.
S: 1 to 3. EncBrit – https://www.britannica.com/story/what-is-the-metaverse-2-media-and-information-expertsexplain (last access: 9 October 2022). 4. TERMIUM PLUS – https://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2alpha/alpha-eng.html?lang=eng&i=1&srchtxt=metaverse&index=alt&codom2nd_wet=1#resultrecs (last access: 9 October 2022). 5. EncBrit – https://www.britannica.com/story/what-is-the-metaverse-2-media-and-information-expertsexplain (last access: 9 October 2022).
SYN: meta-universe
S: TERMIUM PLUS – https://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2alpha/alpha-eng.html?lang=eng&i=1&srchtxt=metaverse&index=alt&codom2nd_wet=1#resultrecs (last access: 9 October 2022); GDT – https://gdt.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ficheOqlf.aspx?Id_Fiche=26559539 (last access: 9 October 2022).
CR: artificial intelligence, computer science, cyberspace, Internet, virtual reality.
