It’s been more than half a year since Facebook changed its name to Meta, in reference to the futuristic and nebulous concept of the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg is all in on this burgeoning technology, calling it the “future of social connection.” Other tech giants, from Microsoft to Apple, seem to share his vision — that the metaverse is a force capable of revolutionizing the internet. There have been news reports about everything from people getting married in the metaverse to entities buying up property in the space. But what…is it?

If you’re confused, that’s perfectly understandable. The term itself is taken straight from science fiction, and part of the reason it’s so hard to pin down conceptually is that some argue that the metaverse is still being built. Katie enlisted the help of Wall Street Journal tech columnist Joanna Stern to explain on this week’s episode of Next Question.

What is the metaverse?

The term has been around since the 1990s. It was coined by the author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science-fiction novel Snow Crash, to describe an online universe that people could explore using digital versions of themselves. The theme reappeared in the bestselling 2011 novel Ready Player One. That’s the overall concept of the metaverse: persistent virtual worlds that live on whether or not you’re plugged in. 

Examples of these domains already exist: Take multi-player video games for example, like World of Warcraft, where players have virtual avatars that interact in a digital realm, or Fortnite, the battle royale game popular among kids. But the dimension that companies like Meta and Microsoft are now seizing on and trying to build out is that of virtual reality and augmented-reality experiences. (FYI, virtual reality allows people to directly access and interact with a virtual world through instruments like VR headsets, while augmented reality refers to overlaying a computer-generated image or animation on top of the real world.) 

Meta has developed the Quest 2 virtual reality headset and has its own social VR platform called Horizon Worlds. The vision for this environment is that people will be able to plug in and completely immerse themselves in the virtual space, doing many of the activities they carry out in the real world, Stern says, including meet people, have conversations, work with colleagues, work out, buy and sell things, and more. 

And if you take a step back, as Stern told Katie during their digital meeting in Horizon Worlds (luckily, we have a video of this interaction below, which should not be missed), the metaverse feels like a logical next step for Meta. “Think about what we did here: We made accounts, we dressed our avatars, we gave them names, we put on the headset, we came to a place to talk. That’s what Facebook has been for the internet, right? A place where people are congregating and socializing in a virtual space,” Stern says.

When will the metaverse go mainstream?

It’ll probably be a while before the majority of us are logging into Horizon Worlds to grab a digital brunch with friends. The headsets are still clunky and pretty pricey — and the social platform itself isn’t without its glitches (or as Katie puts it, not “quite ready for prime time”).

Stern says that even the CEOs of some of the biggest companies concede that we’re still a few years away from the technology becoming sophisticated enough to keep pace with this all-immersive vision of the metaverse. But Stern, who wrote a fascinating column about spending 24 hours in the metaverse, told us that despite the metaverse’s relatively primitive state, she can see its potential.

“I would meet some colleagues around a conference room table like this, and it felt far more real than the Zooms we had been doing day after day after day,” she tells Katie. “There’s this melding of the virtual and the real world that happens when you’re wearing [a VR headset].”