Matthew Ball: You’re thinking of the metaverse all wrong!
In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, announced that his company was changing its name to Meta Platforms and pursuing the development of the three-dimensional internet, as the successor to mobile computing. He called it the “Metaverse,” borrowing the term from the 1992 Neal Stephenson sci-fi novel Snow Crash. Since then, the metaverse has become increasingly synonymous with Meta, and most laypeople — if they understand it at all — assume that partaking in it means wearing a virtual reality headset so that we can spend all our time in a colorful, corny-looking 3D world, where we all live as avatars resembling Pixar characters.
Three years later, consumers haven’t exactly been jumping into it. Meta spent $46 billion on its Reality Labs division during that time but it only produced about $6 billion in revenue. And sales have been flat or declining since 2021. Has the metaverse died before it even arrived?
Not so, says Matthew Ball, the CEO of Epyllion, a diversified holding company that makes angel investments, provides advisory services, and produces TV, films, and video games. Ball, formerly the Head of Strategy for Amazon Studios, has been writing about the metaverse for years, even before the term exploded into popular lexicon. In his 2022 bestselling book, The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything, he explained in detail that the metaverse is much, much more than a 3D world independent from our own. And it will not belong to one single company: it is the next evolution of the internet itself. We won’t be living in the metaverse; it will be all around us. And yes, it will change everything.
But so much has happened since Ball’s book was first published. Generative AI seems to have supplanted the metaverse as investors’ (and even Meta’s) primary focus. Cryptocurrency has grown more mainstream, despite weathering multiple exchange failures. Apple has released its Vision Pro in pursuit of “spatial computing.”
Thus, Ball has revised and updated the book. The Metaverse: Fully Revised and Updated Edition: Building the Spatial Internet, arrives July 23rd. Freethink spoke with Ball to discuss, among other things, why the metaverse’s current situation is reminiscent of the internet’s past, and why it is still likely to be the internet’s future.
Freethink
