2023-06-24 00:28:03
The word ‘metaverse’ was not once uttered during the Apple event. Instead, company representatives stressed that the device was a foray into the ‘spatial computing‘. Vision Pro glasses are, above all, a piece of equipment that isolates you while you work or watch a movie. The more social component is that when a human being approaches you in the real world, the digital screen consuming your consciousness dims just enough to let you know someone is approaching, perhaps to ask for a stapler.
Neither company relies solely on its particular vision. Apple’s demo included the usual VR tricks, transporting us into crazy situations, like a tightrope between mountains. And Meta has its own vision of a multi-screen digital office.
But Apple’s passion was clearly directed toward redefining work and expanding popular apps, as a mindfulness tool that relaxes the breath and, presumably, the soul. Instead of lulling your inner being with a calming image on a flat screen, Apple offers you a full-length hug in the form of flower-petal-like figures that move toward you and end up surrounding you in an explosion of ‘about-itude’. And Apple’s workplace simulation dazzled with its graphical fidelity and an endless stream of screens, controlled by absurdly intuitive finger movements. Meanwhile, its social aspect was rather mediocre, being limited to Facetime representations of your friends and colleagues. Instead, Meta’s job ambitions appear to have stalled: future versions of the $1,500 Quest Pro, the high-end helmet she ran her software of productivity, seem to have been discarded.
It will be fascinating to see which of these worlds manages to attract us. Or if anyone even does. Are we prepared to abandon reality, the one that humans have lived in for tens of thousands of years, and jump into the metaverse, or to trade our natural vision for Vision Pro?
Maybe your impulse is to say No! I love the real world. There are trees! But have you ever sat down at the table with teenagers or venture capital professionals? Instead of soaking in the flavors and aromas of the food or absorbing the conversation, they stare at their phones, endlessly sliding their fingers over the screens. A reasonably priced device that consumes even more attention would increase what drives people to spend time with gadgets. It may not happen any time soon, but the tech giants, no fools, are pouring billions of dollars into removing any obstacles to that future. If they do, reality as we know it won’t stand a chance. And when we use the word presenceWe will refer to the opposite.
Neal Stephenson, the author of the metaverse
The writer Neal Stephenson invented the metaverse. Or at least she devised it and named it. The first time that term was used was in his novel Snow Crash, describing an alternate reality in which the planet’s inhabitants can achieve fame and glory in an artificial computer-generated universe. Not bad for 1992. I wrote about Stephenson in 1999 for Newsweek. And what has happened to him in 2023? Neal works in a startup Dedicated to the metaverse.
When it comes to describing the mentality nerd, no one beats Stephenson. His predecessors in the cyberpunk science fiction movement, writers such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, described the hackers like moody leather-clad James Deans. Stephenson exposes their way of thinking and acting: clumsy, talkative good people whose insistence on logic turns them into extreme lunatics. That, and his sense of the technological future, an imaginative vision taking off from the launch pad of scientific truth and the bustle of Silicon Valley, have made him required reading in the high-tech world, the ‘Hemingway’. hacker‘. “Everybody here reads Neal Stephenson,” said Mike Paull, then director of the division of hardware from Microsoft. “It’s our inspiration.”
Stephenson debuted in 1984 with a little-known satire of mega-universities, titled The Big U; Although he denies this, his admirers do not: “I would eat a live iguana to have another copy,” wrote an admirer on Amazon.com. then came Zodiac, a story of eco-activism that won the hearts of people who defend trees, but also did not sell. The great success was Snow Crash, a manic depiction of a future dominated by virtual reality and quick pizza delivery. The artificial world he created, the Metaverse, was quickly recognized by the cyberspace crowd as the most sensible representation of Where is everything going?, if you have enough bandwidth and the right business plan. Suddenly, Stephenson became the golden child of technologists.
Article originally published in WIRED. Adapted by Andrei Osornio.
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