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.
Author 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. In addition to popularizing the concept of digital avatars, the novel’s depiction of a networked 3D world is said to have influenced real-life web programs, including Google Earth and NASA World Wind.
Another novel that popularized the metaverse was Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, published in 2011 and later made into a movie by Steven Spielberg. It depicted a future where people escape real-world problems by entering The Oasis, a virtual world accessed using a VR headset and haptic gloves that provide tactile sensations. Such haptic feedback also became a key metaverse building block.
Fiction aside, the foundational technologies supporting an actual metaverse date back to the 1960s. The metaverse’s legacy includes two other hype waves that are all but forgotten — the first one in the early 2000s when use of the pioneering Second Life virtual community plateaued after initial growth, and the second in 2010 when the first VR headsets proved not to be the gateway to the metaverse that inventors anticipated. Both busts led to significant technological advances, though.
Here is a sampling of the inventors whose pioneering work proved integral to the current concept of the metaverse. A graphic showing a comprehensive timeline of metaverse technology milestones follows.
Dawn of virtual reality
American cinematographer and inventor Morton Heilig built the Sensorama in 1962. The mechanical device simulated the experience of riding a motorcycle through New York City by using a 3D movie, vibrating chair, a fan and piped-in smells, providing one of the earliest immersive multimedia experiences.
American computer scientist and Turing Award winner Ivan Sutherland created his revolutionary computer program, Sketchpad, in 1963 as a student at MIT, laying the foundation for modern computer graphics and human-computer interaction.
Jaron Lanier, another American computer scientist, began his pioneering work in virtual reality in the mid-1980s, developing some of the earliest commercial VR headsets and data gloves.
World Wide Web
British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed the first open source web server, browser and editor in the late 1980s and early 1990s, inventing the World Wide Web, a linked network of webpages, graphics and other media making information accessible and navigable.
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games
A host of developers and designers, including Richard Garriott, Raph Koster and Mark Jacobs, introduced MMORPGs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, demonstrating the commercial viability of large-scale virtual games.
Bitcoin, blockchain and NFTs
The pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency, and launched the first public blockchain using a proof-of-work algorithm in 2009.
In 2015, Russian-Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood, a British computer scientist, launched Ethereum, a blockchain platform that introduced smart contracts. These contracts enabled the creation of decentralized applications and digital tokens, including non-fungible tokens. The Ethereum platform can support autonomous systems in the metaverse, such as virtual economies and governance mechanisms.
Other metaverse notables
In random order, a partial list of other modern-day metaverse enablers includes the following:
- Mark Zuckerberg of Meta.
- Tim Sweeney of Epic Games.
- Jens Bergensten of Minecraft fame.
- Sam Mathews of Fnatic.
- Tim Cook of Apple.
- Jensen Huang of Nvidia.
- Peggy Johnson of Magic Leap.
- Sam Altman of OpenAI.
