The Metaverse's Many Deaths: Why VR Keeps Rising from the Grave

The recent shutdown of Meta's Horizon Worlds has reignited debates about whether the metaverse is finally dead. When Neal Stephenson, the author who coined the term "metaverse" in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, declared the concept dead and buried, many took it as the final verdict. But history suggests we've heard this funeral dirge before.

As someone who built networked consumer VR systems for Sega before Stephenson wrote his seminal work, I can attest that the metaverse has died more times than we can count. Each death has been followed by a resurrection, driven not by hardware evangelism but by the perfect combination of technology and compelling experiences.

The uncomfortable truth about VR hardware is that it has always been a barrier to adoption. Ivan Sutherland's 1960s head-mounted display earned the nickname "Sword of Damocles" because its motion-tracking armature had to be mounted on the ceiling. NASA's VIEW system from 40 years ago, developed to train astronauts for spacewalks, was only tolerable because the alternative involved donning scuba gear and floating in a giant fishbowl – an impossibility in orbit.

Jaron Lanier pioneered VR as a creative medium, followed by artists like Char Davies, who won a Prix Ars Electronica for her fully immersive OSMOSE. These early systems required users to suit up with goggles, trackers, headphones, and even chest bands to measure breathing for virtual floating experiences. Thirty years ago, this required a supercomputer to power.

Then came Google Cardboard in 2014. Two engineers on the Google I/O stage introduced a device made from 50 cents' worth of folded pizza boxes and plastic lenses that turned any reasonably capable smartphone into a full-blown VR headset. In an instant, the number of VR systems exploded from a few thousand to a few billion, enabling enthusiasts to create a wealth of interesting applications with minimal infrastructure.

Post-Cardboard developments have focused on refinement – making experiences smaller, lighter, and less likely to induce motion sickness. This last point is crucial. Motion sickness led to the cancellation of the Sega VR project I worked on in 1993, and it affects many people who use immersive virtual reality. That's a primary reason people abandon headsets after trying them once.

The surest path to nausea-free immersion leads through augmented reality. Keeping people grounded in the real world with synthetic additions provides a stability that pure VR cannot match. Even advanced "pass-through" systems like Apple Vision Pro and Samsung XR still feel unnatural, with most users tolerating them for only about an hour.

Yet augmented reality presents its own paradox: to achieve the kind of immersion our bodies can tolerate, we must accept continuous environmental mapping. Every AR system must function as a surveillance system – not out of malevolence, but as an engineering necessity. This creates tension between the desire for comfortable immersion and privacy concerns.

Stephenson imagines public reaction against "glassholes" as permanent and insurmountable. But he simultaneously makes an observation that undermines his argument: nobody visited Horizon Worlds because there was no reason to go there. Meanwhile, millions enjoy Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite every hour because these platforms offer compelling activities.

The lesson is clear: it's never been about the device. It's about what the device enables us to do. When AR spectacles and a "killer app" converge, adoption will follow regardless of prior skepticism. Just as artificial intelligence has died and been reborn multiple times – only to work out spectacularly – the metaverse persists through cycles of death and resurrection.

The technology that has died more times than VR is artificial intelligence. And that seems to have worked out.

The perfect combination of hardware and experiences will arrive, no matter what Zuck and Neal Stephenson think.