"I'm building a business for the metaverse at the moment, and there is something real if you look past the hype. The problem is that it doesn't quite look like

"I'm building a business for the metaverse at the moment, and there is something real if you look past the hype. The problem is that it doesn't quite look like the metaverse of Ready Player One or Snowcrash." I will say I think it's a bit of an antipattern to get too stuck to a particular fictional representation of something. It doesn't seem to be too common, but it tends to blind people to the real possibilites because they're too busy trying to jam it in a mold created by someone 30 years ago. Kinda reminds me of what I call the BOAC fallacy: http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2916 http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2916 although it's not the same. Just because someone wrote about it in a particular fun story doesn't mean that it's going to end up that way, and I'd bet it won't. Most fictional universes tend to ignore business fragmentation, which takes us to... "What we're missing is a common interop format" Perhaps it's my own limitations, but I can't even dream of what a "common interop format" would look like, or more importantly, why any player would agree to use it anytime soon. There's a lot of business case studies as to why everyone will be happy to agree to an "interop standard" of their own control and let other people's content into their walled garden, to be subject to the constraints of their walled garden, but will not do anything to let content out of their own walled garden, the net effect being no interop. This smells of Compuserve/Prodigy/AOL/etc. all over again. Unless you just mean simple avatar interop, although the lowest common denominator is going to be pretty low for a while. Roblox probably runs entire gaming worlds with the resources an Unreal 4 avatar designed for a high-end computer could demand. I believe a counterexample to ignoring that fragmentation is Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End, which I have not read, but I believe there is no single AR "metaverse" in that, but the technology is used for all sorts of things; you can opt in to the "fantasy" "metaverse", or the sci-fi one, or the Victorian England one, etc etc.