The recent hype around the metaverse belies a history that dates back to the previous century when the name was introduced into the lexicon, albeit in a fictional setting.Īuthor Neal Stephenson coined the word metaverse in his 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash to describe a virtualized environment where people gained status based in part on the technical skill of their avatars. Readers can follow the hyperlinks to other TechTarget articles for deeper dives into these and other topics, as well as to our in-depth definitions of key metaverse terms and novel techniques such as digital threads and Gaussian splatting.

Topics covered include the various technologies and platforms that support the metaverse, ongoing challenges, real-world use cases and the metaverse's impact on the future of work. What are companies to make of a technology phenomenon that's hot one day, cold the next and in the throes of rebranding itself? TechTarget's guide to the metaverse breaks down where this rapidly evolving set of technologies stands today and where it's headed. In e-commerce, customers are clamoring for virtual products that 'tie back to the physical world,' according to a June 2023 McKinsey report, which stated that the market for metaverse commerce alone - 'from home and food to fitness and apparel' - could drive '$5 trillion in value creation by 2030.' A report from data-gathering company Statista pegs the metaverse market at $74.4 billion in 2024 and predicts that by 2030, at an annual growth of rate of 38%, it will reach $507.8 billion with over 2.6 billion users. Businesses are also using virtual reality (VR) to train employees and applying augmented reality (AR) to overlay information on real-world objects, helping their employees work better. In the area known as the industrial metaverse, epitomized by the Nvidia Omniverse platform, companies are building digital twins to design and monitor physical objects.

The development of new technology such as eye tracking, which uses sensors to monitor and record eye movements, promises to make visual experiences more engaging. Components of it are gaining traction as graphics and capabilities for virtual and augmented reality, bolstered by AI, rapidly improve. Why metaverse technology is still important for businessesĪlthough the vision of a rapid gestation of fully-realized virtual worlds where humans work, shop and socialize from the comfort of their couches has dimmed, the metaverse isn't dead. Comparisons of augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality in a nutshell. In its 2024 debut of the Apple Vision Pro headset, Apple, for example, took pains to disassociate the device from the metaverse, calling it instead an entrée to spatial computing. The backlash to metaverse overmarketing included industry repudiation of the term itself. Media reports proclaimed the metaverse was dead. The losses at Meta's Reality Labs unit increased to $16.1 billion in 2023, and Disney cut its metaverse division. Microsoft laid off employees from its Mixed Reality Toolkit and HoloLens teams, cryptocurrency collapsed and consumers, eager to return to their pre-COVID lives, were not clamoring for extended reality devices. Financial losses ensued, notably Meta's $13.7 billion operational loss in its Reality Labs division for 2022 as a whole. In late 2022, about the time ChatGPT captured the world's attention, the metaverse bubble popped.

What happened to the metaverse? Is it dead? Bill Gates jumped on the bandwagon, predicting that meetings would move from screens to the metaverse in two or three years. In November 2021, Facebook renamed itself Meta and announced a $10 billion investment in developing virtual experiences, prompting enthusiasts to anoint the metaverse as the world's new computing interface. Hefty industry investment in metaverse-enabling technologies, the growth of online video games, breakthroughs in AI and the acceleration of remote work and socializing driven by the COVID-19 pandemic spurred more tech innovation and increased user adoption of online life.

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