Neal Stephenson’s classic 1992 dystopian novel Snow Crash inspired today’s tech industry in many ways. Google Earth is said to have been inspired by the novel’s “Earth” software, which lets people interactively visualize the whole world. Snow Crash is also the origin of an immersive virtual world Stephenson called the “Metaverse,” which, of course, Mark Zuckerberg used last year to describe his ambition to create a virtual reality platform and a new generation of computer interfaces.
Visions for the metaverse include ways for people to work, socialize, and interact using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies (collectively called Extended Reality or XR). While Meta has attempted to claim the term metaverse for its own, this area has also become a research focus for Google, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and Tiktok’s parent company ByteDance among others, all of whom have launched or announced plans to launch XR hardware or services in the near future. This next generation of devices will be more sophisticated than today’s gadgets, which means their data collection capabilities will likewise increase along with new and substantial risks to our This article has been indexed from Deeplinks
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