Virtual Reality—be it Star Trek’s Holodeck or Ready Player One headsets—is an old staple of the imagined future. Pop on a headset and you can visit anywhere you like, real or fantastical. Want to walk around first-century Pompeii? See inside an atom? Bowl with friends who live a world away? The Metaverse taps into such collective fantasies: a three-dimensional version of the internet, with vast numbers of intersecting virtual worlds, ecosystems, and economies. In the Metaverse, you can go ahead and bowl atoms in Pompeii with all your far-flung friends.
