A History of the Metaverse
David J. H. Burden, Maggi Savin‐Baden · 2024
This chapter provides an overview of the history of the Metaverse, both as an idea and as a series of evolving virtual worlds and extended reality experiences and technologies. It examines how some of the early text-based social spaces could be considered as proto-metaverses before looking at the graphical two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) social virtual worlds that evolved during the 1990s and 2000s. The chapter then describes how, from 2013, the concept of the Metaverse became dominated by the new generation of headset-mounted VR displays (HMD-VR) and the rise of popular 3D game worlds, before examining the impact of Meta&s;s decision to back the Metaverse concept, and then the rise of the blockchain and cryptocurrency-based virtual worlds. It also briefly considers the developments in augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) that are relevant to the Metaverse. The chapter closes by examining how the Metaverse has been represented in fictional works.