The Origins of the Metaverse

MMGC Visiting Professor Dr Colin Harvey has written and presented a programme for BBC Radio 4 entitled The Origins of the Metaverse, which aired at 8pm on Saturday 12th March as part of the Archive on 4 strand and is now available online on BBC Sounds.

When Facebook changed its name to Meta at the end of 2021, the word "metaverse" got everywhere.

But the idea of a virtual reality, fully immersed life, spent in a structured, created, illusory perceived universe has its roots a lot deeper than that, even before the writer Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel Snow Crash.

Pygmalion's Spectacles, a science fiction novella by Stanley G Weinbaum has hints of the idea. Perhaps it goes back to the beginnings of ancient philosophical traditions. It’s hard to nail down, so ubiquitous is the idea. Indeed, "world building" is in many ways just what film-makers, game-writers, authors and story-tellers have been doing for centuries.

More recently, it has even become fashionable to speculate that the universe as we perceive it now is actually some kind of a simulation, running in some sort of super-real computing medium outside of what we can sense.

On top of the growing sophistication and growing numbers of VR-headsets and AR devices, immersive games today and of the near future will involve artificial characters that try their best to emulate real people in their interactions with players.

So how might you convince one of them that their universe is a synthetic creation, merely the latest in a long continuum of human technological creativity? And why would that matter anyway?