People forget that in the very first paragraphs where he describes the metaverse in Snow Crash, he gets geeky on the details, describing how the headset’s lasers beam vectors of color to the eye, and how the experience is enhanced by what we now call spatial audio. Stephenson has always had an engineering outlook. This novelist’s participation in a tech company is not as drastic a pivot as one might think. And seeing his fictional creation colonized by profit-seeking growth-greedy goliaths wasn’t fun. For one thing, the metaverse according to Snow Crash was a somewhat dystopian locale, a fact ignored by the companies telling us that it will be a great place to live. The answers Stephenson provided to that question were a mix of bemusement or, as a WIRED writer noted, disgust. “That turned into the ‘Neal, how do you feel about the Metaverse?’ book tour,” says Stephenson. Everyone from Microsoft to Amazon was suddenly coming up with a metaverse strategy, even though the technologies that might make it happen are still out of our grasp.Īt the time, Stephenson was publicizing his most recent novel, with a theme involving climate engineering. Most notably, Facebook, spending billions on its Reality Labs, renamed itself Meta. “Metaverse” became a buzz word, and Big Tech raced to productize it. But late last year, Stephenson’s ambient, persistent and immersive alt-reality suddenly became known as the next step in computing. That book cemented him as a major writer, and since then he’s had huge success. Though other science fiction writers had similar ideas-and the pioneers of VR were already building artificial worlds-Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash not only fleshed out the vision of escaping to a place where digital displaced the physical, it also gave it a name.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |