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is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
Neal Stephenson didn’t invent the virtual reality headset. But Meta certainly knows his name — in 1992, his seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash coined the phrase “Metaverse” to describe a virtual reality world experienced through VR goggles. It inspired many key VR developers — and in 2021, Facebook decided to rename its entire company to Meta to chase that metaverse dream.
Now, Stephenson says he no longer believes face-worn computing is the future. He thinks Meta’s glasses are creepy: “People don’t like wearing things on their faces and don’t trust those who do.” He thinks goggles are no longer the future in a world in a world filled with phones: “There is no business case for headsets any more.”
He says he’s changed his mind overall:
When I was working at Magic Leap, and people asked me why I thought that was a good idea, I would ask the rhetorical question: “do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?” At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no.
Reader, I have changed my mind. Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at handheld rectangles. Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces.
And, he says, shrinking headsets down to the size of glasses won’t work as long as they stay creepy.
In his blog post, which is worth reading in full, it sounds like he’s tacitly agreeing with Meta, and with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, and quite possibly with Google which is quietly building a new category of “metaverse” apps, that the “Metaverse” doesn’t need to be about virtual reality anymore. It can refer to simpler flat games. It’s convenient for those companies that the man who coined “Metaverse” doesn’t mind them using it that way.
But it may hurt that he thinks the hardware is so creepy.
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