Back in the 90s we had the "metaverse" in the form of MUDs and MOOs. And they were text. I spent a lot of time in MOOs (LambdaMOO et al and various others) as a participant and a programmer and an advocate of them and a contributor to new servers, etc. And they were glorious and compelling, but maybe too compelling for some people.
But they were buried by the web. They wouldn't have scaled out anyways, but we were working on that. But they were mostly lost in time.
Ego-capitalists like Zuckerberg want to pilfer from that history and make something they control. The interesting parts of the Internet have been buried by things like Facebook which has offered a dumbed-down walled-in Internet where your uncle can act out his own virtual reality fantasy of ranting about Obama at the thanksgiving table all year long to an imaginary bottomless audience. Sigh.
I personally won't let VR goggles into my house. I'd like my teenagers to grow up without them.
But they were buried by the web. They wouldn't have scaled out anyways, but we were working on that. But they were mostly lost in time.
Ego-capitalists like Zuckerberg want to pilfer from that history and make something they control. The interesting parts of the Internet have been buried by things like Facebook which has offered a dumbed-down walled-in Internet where your uncle can act out his own virtual reality fantasy of ranting about Obama at the thanksgiving table all year long to an imaginary bottomless audience. Sigh.
I personally won't let VR goggles into my house. I'd like my teenagers to grow up without them.