One evening a few years ago, I was at an art exhibition when someone handed me a pair of goggles and told me to put them on. They were part of one of the artworks and putting them on transplanted me into the middle of a street in a coastal village I'd never been to in real life. I could walk along the pavement, watch fishermen walking past, look at the grey-green waves of the tranquil sea. It was a strange sensation. I could walk a whole circle round myself and the seaside environment surrounded me, but I couldn't smell the salt of the sea and I couldn't feel the wind on my skin. Today, there are technologies being developed that would fill in these gaps, so I could feel fully transported. And it's all part of a bigger project - the metaverse.

If you look up tech trends for 2022, almost every article lists the "metaverse," a term originally coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash and now repurposed by Facebook's - or Meta's - Mark Zuckerberg.

There's a lot of confusion around what this term actually means. Is it the future of the internet? A video game? An uncomfortable new version of Zoom? Is it a fad or is it really what the future will look like?

As much as we've seen the word "metaverse" floating around, for most people it's tricky to pin down exactly what this means. Taking meta further back to its ancient Greek roots, you will find that it can mean "with", "after", "on top of", "beyond", or "alongside". For example, a metaphor is an act of carrying (phora) something beyond (meta). In a similar vein, the word "meta" can mean a level of self-referentiality. For instance, metacognition is thinking about thinking - about cognition.

How about verse? Well, verse in this case doesn't mean a section of a song or bible passage, but rather an abbreviation of "universe".

Therefore, the metaverse is a self-aware, self-referential universe. A universe that addresses the fourth wall, so to speak - its own materiality. Or it's a universe that goes beyond the universe, after it, with it, on top of it, alongside it... It's a universe over and above our current universe.

The metaverse doesn't involve one particular technology that adds to our experience of daily life. It's a plethora of technologies working together - with this. As one article by WIRED puts it, the metaverse isn't so much a new technology as it is "a broad shift in how we interact with technology." It's not just about the tools it involves, but how we use them, how digital technology comes to infiltrate every aspect of life.

The kind of technologies involved in this new way of being include:

In some ways, it would appear that the metaverse already exists in the form of games. After all, in games, you have an avatar or character you play as. And you can often buy clothes and other accessories for your character - with real money too! Think, for example, of the popular eSports games, Fortnite, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike, which don't cost you money to play but in which you can make in-game purchases that make your character stronger or cooler-looking.

Various games are also beginning to offer virtual concerts and other artistic experiences. Since 2019, Fortnite has hosted in-game concerts with real-life artists. And this isn't an ordinary video; you need to be playing the game to attend the concert. And you can fully enter virtual worlds with devices like the Oculus.

But the metaverse is much bigger than these things. Imagine you took one of these games and expanded it broadly across society, so you could have virtual meetings, classes, holidays, and more. As the technology becomes more powerful, our engagements with it will become more widespread and what is now a niche experience will become ubiquitous.

The first time I heard about the metaverse was when Facebook changed their name to Meta, with Co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announcing:

"The metaverse is the next evolution of social connection. Our company’s vision is to help bring the metaverse to life, so we are changing our name to reflect our commitment to this future."

In this vision of the metaverse, the primary description of this new reality is that it will be social. 3D spaces in the metaverse will be aimed at socialization, education, collaboration, and play. And it's not elitist: it's a "future made by all of us" that is "open to everyone."

The metaverse promises to be more immersive, allowing for togetherness when you are physically apart. In his historic address, Zuckerberg announced that the metaverse would allow for virtual interactions that include the crucial aspects of interaction currently missing from the internet, namely:

He describes the metaverse as "an embodied internet." Its intention is to be more natural and vivid than our current internet interactions, delivering the "deep feeling of presence" in the absence of physicality.

Which sets up an interesting paradox: the metaverse is meant to embrace the physical aspects of interaction, all the things the internet can't give you... But without leaving the internet behind and without actually involving in-the-flesh engagements. So, the metaverse promises a level of connection in physical disconnection.

There are a lot of questions around the specifics of the metaverse... Like, how exactly will it work? Will we all wear VR headsets for work... and leisure? What about people who experience motion sickness or eye strain after wearing these for too long? And AR glasses face a similar problem - along with them not being the most stylish of spectacles...

Some have suggested that it'll finally be the time for holograms. I mean, all the sci-fi films have them - even the 1970s Star Wars movies. So why can't they be a reality?

Well, holograms aren't as far off as some think! A hologram offers a shifting perspective based on your position, enabling the eye to adjust focal depth to focus on the foreground and background alternatively. And holograms have technically been around in some form since the mid-1900s. But recently, great strides have been made in that direction.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow have developed holograms that you can touch, promising that soon you'll be able to shake a virtual colleague's hand! These holograms use "aerohaptics", physical feelings of touch that are created with jets of air. Compared to the VR headsets currently available for use, these holograms enable you to have the sensation of touch, not just sight.

The system also makes use of glass and mirrors to provide the illusion of a 3D virtual image. The next step these scientists envisage is adding smell and temperature to the equation. Eventually, we'll be able to have embodied experiences with friends and family continents away from us, while in the comfort of our own homes!

This all sounds very exciting and otherworldly but it also seems a lot like the plot of a Black Mirror episode - not to mention that the metaverse originated in a dystopian novel. Is there some darker side of the metaverse we may be missing here?

In a disparaging opinion piece run by the Guardian, John Nauhgton calls the metaverse dystopian and absurd. In his view, Zuckerberg changed Facebook to Meta in an attempt to divert attention away from the bad press that his company was getting. Moreover, the metaverse is an idea from dystopian science fiction - that is science fiction that envisages a nightmare version of the world... Yet, other tech giants all want a piece of the pie. As Naughton writes:

"[The] really intriguing thing about the new obsession with metaverse(s) is that it seems to have missed the point that the future envisaged in Stephenson’s novel is a deeply, deeply dystopian one. His metaverse is a vision of how a virtual-reality-based internet, resembling a massively multiplayer online game, might evolve."

Similarly, John Hanke, CEO of Niantic, says that anyone who's read all the way to the end of the fictional tale of the metaverse knows that "the world in those books is a horrible place." As a counterpoint to this dystopian vision, Hanke envisages a future in which tech and daily life enmesh seamlessly, making our lives easier and freeing us to focus on uniquely human things that tech cannot replicate. In Hanke's view, it's not about digitizing our most precious experiences but saving us time on the less precious experiences.

The metaverse is intended to add to our experience of life, to enhance our engagements with people that we can't physically be with, or to enable us to see places we couldn't afford to visit offline. It is meant to address issues around our interactions with others in a time of widespread loneliness and disconnect. Yet, there's a strange irony at play here.

Social media was meant to help people have better relationships with people they've lost touch with, but in the time of social media, young people have become more disconnected and depressed. According to one study, published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology in 2018, the less people used social media, the less depressed and lonely they felt. If social media as it currently exists is highly correlated with depression, is a more immersive version of this really the answer?

In the popular 1999 film, The Matrix, Neo finds out that the world he always took for granted was nothing but an illusion created by artificial intelligence. The science fiction trope of living in a simulation has become a staple and it's never painted as utopian.

While discussions of the metaverse typically position people as in control and tech as a mere tool for simulated experiences, the fact that we are envisioning a simulated universe over and above our day-to-day universe does raise some interesting questions, such as:

Well, to return from the realm of the imaginary, Gartner expects that by 2026, 25% of people will spend a minimum of an hour everyday in the metaverse. That's pretty far away from your whole life, but still, the hour specification is a minimum.

It's likely that in the future, our engagements over the web will transform into engagements in the metaverse, for better or for worse.

Although the metaverse isn't physical in the same way that offline experience is, there will still be bad actors - as there are in every other sphere of life. VR experiences mean that harassment, bullying, and assault can both feel very real and be more difficult to punish than in the offline world.

Many people and companies have expressed concern over what children might be exposed to in the metaverse and how they might easily be targeted there, while others have complained about actual experiences of virtual attacks. And there is only so much that the developers of such apps can do to mitigate these issues.

With the idea that people can be fitted with full-body suits to feel more sensations in future iterations of the metaverse, many fear that this will only serve to make the experience of abuse worse in the virtual world. Not to mention that, when it comes to consequences for abusers, tracking down an avatar can be a lot more difficult than tracking down a physical human being.

Moreover, terrorist researchers at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center in Omaha, Nebraska, see a potential dark side to the metaverse, in which terrorists use the metaverse as a new region for their expression of violent extremism.

When Meta (Facebook) talks about the future of the metaverse, they say it will be open to all. But accessibility is more difficult to achieve than they imply especially when it relies upon sophisticated VR technology. And when there's a great disparity in wealth between developed and developing countries, there's the potential for the bearers of new tech to amass a lot of power over the recipients of that tech. As Patrick Gray writes in an article for TechRepublic:

"What happens to those who can’t afford the hardware that gives access to the metaverse, an expense that represents the annual salary for people in more than half the world’s countries? Do we trust tech titans to become literal gods in a digital universe that’s their creation and property? As a student of history, it’s hard not to see parallels between the visions of a utopian digital universe and the utopias imagined by various tyrants that ultimately went terribly wrong."

Could the metaverse translate into a kind of technological colonialism, or is this a bit far fetched? How much do we ultimately trust the tech giants in charge of the budding metaverse?

I can't help but think of the comical figure of the tech billionaire in the recent, controversial film, Don't Look Up, who appeared to be a caricatured combination of Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. This whimsical man had amassed great power and, while he was undoubtedly intelligent, his interference in international affairs was very misguided and catastrophic for all but a handful of wealthy individuals. Yes, I am aware that Don't Look Up is a satire but it was effective - and controversial - for a reason: it reflected some uncomfortable realities about the power and sway of politics and wealthy tech masters. It also displayed the lack of trust that many people place in tech billionaires like those building the new metaverse.

The common worry is that people like Zuckerberg are a little out of touch with the rest of the world and, perhaps, with what's best for human interactions as well.

What do you think? Is the metaverse an exciting new future? Is it a world of virtual reality, augmented reality, and holograms that will help us feel more connected than ever before, while minimizing the need to actually travel? Are all the sceptics just shortsighted luddites? Will it really be as ubiquitous as in a sci-fi film? And what does the future of human socialization look like in this era of the internet, work from home, and avatars?