Techies think we’re on the cusp of a virtual world called ‘the metaverse’. I’m skeptical | Sean Monahan

Silicon Valley has been anticipating virtual reality for more than three decades, and keeps running into the same problem: people mostly like actual reality

Maybe this will be my Paul Krugman moment. The Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist was famously the winner of a study to establish which op-ed commentator was most consistently correct. In 1998, he also famously claimed, By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." I am not nearly so storied in accomplishments as Krugman. But I do make my living offering predictions and forecasts. So I might as well say it: I predict that the metaverse won't happen.

The metaverse," for those who don't know, is a still-mostly-hypothetical virtual world accessed by special virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology. The idea is to create a sort of next-level Internet overlaid on our physical world. People plugged into the metaverse exist in our physical world like everyone else but can see and interact with things that others can't. Think The Matrix or the Star Trek Holodeck or the Fortnite-esque brandscapes of Ready Player One.