Chapter 13. Love me, love my avatar

In the influential cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, author Neal Stephenson envisioned a virtual world, called the Metaverse, as a successor to the Internet. In the Metaverse, everyday people take on glamorous identities in a three-dimensional immersive digital world. The book’s main character delivers pizza in real life, but in the Metaverse, he’s a warrior prince and champion sword fighter. The hugely popular Matrix movie trilogy paints a similar (though more sinister) picture of a world that blurs the lines between physical and digital reality.

Today, these fictional depictions come to life as we witness the tremendous growth of real-time, interactive virtual worlds that allow people to assume virtual identities ...

Get The Truth About What Customers Want now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.