Tech billionaires are a quirky lot. Some are attempting to build a world imagined in utopian visions of the future, such as ‘Star Trek.’ Others, like Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, would like us to spend as much time as possible here on earth, in what they call a “metaverse.” Facebook, which renamed itself Meta Platforms on Thursday—just “Meta” for short—is truly all-in on the concept. It’s as if Goldman Sachs were to rename itself Crypto.

The term “metaverse” is borrowed from science-fiction touchstones like “Snow...

Tech billionaires are a quirky lot. Some are attempting to build a world imagined in utopian visions of the future, such as ‘Star Trek.’ Others, like Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, would like us to spend as much time as possible here on earth, in what they call a “metaverse.” Facebook, which renamed itself Meta Platforms on Thursday—just “Meta” for short—is truly all-in on the concept. It’s as if Goldman Sachs were to rename itself Crypto.

The term “metaverse” is borrowed from science-fiction touchstones like “Snow Crash” and “Ready Player One,” in which characters keep their faces planted firmly in front of one sort of screen or another, ignoring physical reality and instead investing ever more of their time, attention and money in virtual worlds controlled by globe-spanning tech monopolists.

If that future sounds a lot like the present, it’s because the world these CEOs propose is in many ways a souped-up version of the existing internet. The metaverse is a stitching together of disparate technological phenomena of today—videogames, virtual reality, Zoom calls, cryptocurrency, social media—into a new whole upon which countless brands, creators and software engineers can do their thing.

According to Mr. Zuckerberg, the metaverse is the next generation of the internet. This would make it a “platform” like others before it, including open ones like the web, proprietary but broadly accessible ones like “the cloud,” and closed ones like Facebook’s ecosystem and Apple’s app store.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the name Meta better reflects the company's vision for the future, and described plans for the metaverse during a virtual event. Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

“We’ve gone from desktop to web to phones, from text to photos to video, but this isn’t the end of the line,” Mr. Zuckerberg said Thursday in unveiling his vision for Meta. “The next platform and medium will be even more immersive and embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.”

Ariana Grande's concert in Fortnite.

Photo: Epic Games

If the metaverse really is what comes next after mobile—and just before we all get brain implants and fuse with our technology completely—then whoever controls the metaverse will either be an even richer version of one of the world’s trillion-dollar tech companies, or a new giant that disrupts them. As for the rest of us, the lowly users of this metaverse, we’ll all be living by their rules.

From a user perspective, the metaverse is a pretty simple idea. What if there were a place we could all “go” through our internet-connected devices, as many people do in videogames, where we could move around in three dimensions and do everything we do in real life, from socializing to spending money? This shared 3-D world will be accessible, at least at first, from a variety of devices, from our phones to VR headsets. You might steer your digital self from the virtual office to a virtual store to buy a virtual hat to wear to the virtual concert you attend next to friends’ digital avatars. And because it’s “persistent,” the metaverse is there whether we access it or not, like the countless multiplayer online games that inspired it.

It’s worth noting that a version of the metaverse has existed and failed at least once before. Remember Second Life? Some of what’s been said about the metaverse in the past year could be ripped straight from the late 2000s, when proto-metaverse Second Life enabled, for millions of users, much of what is currently claimed as new for the metaverse. That includes socializing in games, working in virtual offices, speculating on virtual real estate, and the rise of digital currencies and digital-only art. Not to mention virtual/real-life love triangles.

“It’s like the tech and media worlds don’t have a good long-term memory,” says Mike Boland, an analyst at ARtillery Intelligence, a research firm specializing in the metaverse. Hype cycles come and go, and a fully-realized metaverse into which we can become fully and even physically immersed, as in the book and film “Ready Player One,” is still 30 years away, he adds.

In the late 2000s, boosters of the Second Life metaverse insisted it wasn’t a passing fad right up until it became obvious it was. The fact our technological tools are now significantly more advanced doesn’t guarantee this time will be different.

This leads to a yet another way of looking at the metaverse: It may turn out to be a world made mostly of hype, an attempt to gin up interest from investors and the media, and a retread of past attempts to suck everyone out of the real world and into virtual ones. If this is the case, it would mean the metaverse as defined by Facebook and game companies can’t win against stiff competition from that other three-dimensional hub of recreation and socialization known as “real life.”

Of course, cities and agriculture and democracy all had to be invented a few times before they finally took root, and succeeding in technology is, as investor Bill Gross has observed, mostly about timing.

A rendering of Nvidia’s ‘omniverse,’ which aims to connect software ecosystems and to allow companies to create digital twins of critical systems and infrastructure.

Photo: NVIDIA

Microsoft and other tech giants are touting their own visions of the metaverse, some substantially different from the one envisioned by Facebook. Chip-design giant Nvidia, for example, has latched onto the term metaverse as a way to market an older concept, the “digital twin.” (A digital twin is a near-perfect virtual copy of a physical system, like a factory, a warehouse, an engine.) In a recent video depicting a metaversical copy of a BMW automotive factory, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

enthuses over the potential of its “omniverse” to allow companies to create digital twins of critical systems and infrastructure.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel recently told my Wall Street Journal colleague Joanna Stern that while the metaverse envisioned by Facebook and gaming companies seeks to distract us from reality by immersing us in an alternative to it, his company wants us to engage more in real life, through augmented reality. Augmented reality is about overlaying our existing reality with items and experiences that encourage us to engage with the real world. By this logic, AR is an alternative to, and competes with, virtual reality, even though both rely on similar technologies.

Other companies, like Niantic, maker of real-world augmented reality game “Pokémon Go,” have espoused a similar vision. Apple, which is working on an augmented-reality headset for consumers, may be headed in this direction, too.

Timoni West, head of AR/VR at Unity, a $40 billion company that makes the software engine that powers many games, says that it’s a false binary to imagine that the metaverse will be either something “inside” a virtual world, accessed through VR headsets, or “outside,” painted over the real world, as in augmented reality accessible through our phones and future AR headsets. Her company showed off at Facebook’s Connect event on Thursday software that allows users to have a shared “mixed reality” experience of playing a board game together, using Facebook’s Oculus 2 headsets. These devices have front-facing cameras and are able to “pass through” a view of the outside world, allowing players to see through them while they overlay virtual items onto their view of reality.

If many of the biggest companies trumpeting their metaverses gather enough users to make continuing to invest in them worthwhile—Facebook has declared its investment in the metaverse will cost it $10 billion in operating profit this year alone—the result is likely to be not “a metaverse” but “metaverses.” In the same way that Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android are incompatible platforms with their own app stores, we’ll all be left with the same choices we have today when accessing the internet—whose walled gardens do we want to inhabit, and how do we minimize the hassles of trying to move information, contacts and content between them?

Anand Agarawala, CEO of VR collaboration startup Spatial, says that his company is working on “portals” that would allow users to jump between various companies’ metaverses, just like we jump between different websites by clicking on links. “We’d love if we could make a portal in Spatial to a portal in Horizon Worlds,” Facebook’s VR collaboration app, he says. Facebook has yet to build the connective tissue that would allow such a thing, however.

Other companies, like Ready Player Me, are working on ways for users to keep the same avatar as they jump between different games and metaverses.

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A small-but-growing cadre of technologists believe it’s possible to build a future metaverse on open standards, just like the web and the internet itself. While still in its infancy, the concept of “Web3” is that the metaverse can be built with open-source code and the same kind of blockchain-based systems that undergird cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Using these technologies, it may be possible to create a global network of computers that can run both a metaverse and all the applications people might want to build atop them. (The incentive to be a part of this infrastructure would be, naturally, cryptocurrency.)

This leads to a final way of looking at the metaverse: a shared world that might be able to transcend the efforts of the world’s largest corporations to control it, at least for a time. Its openness would be attractive to users and entrepreneurs precisely because it allows them to route around the gatekeepers that would dictate to them what they can put in the metaverse, while taking a cut of the revenue they generate from it.

Perhaps, as in tech battles past, future metaverses offered by a variety of companies will coexist for some time before one or another wins out. (Remember AOL’s dominance before the web took it out?)

Even Mr. Zuckerberg on Thursday nodded to the virtues of a metaverse that is built with open standards, interoperability, and with new (presumably democratic) forms of governance. “The metaverse will not be created by one company,” he wrote in a post on Facebook.

On the other hand, today’s tech giants haven’t gained their status as history’s most valuable companies based on their talent for restraint and comity. Many people today worry Facebook and other tech titans already have too much influence over our world. In the metaverse future, the virtual world we live in could be theirs.

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Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
Anand Agarawala is the CEO of VR collaboration startup Spatial. An earlier version of this article misspelled his first name. (Corrected on Oct. 29)