Beyond Meta: The Seven Verses

I just gave a talk at AWE2021 called “Beyond Meta: What Makes AR Special.”

Let’s be real. The word Metaverse means something different to everyone at this point. It’s the sum total of everyone’s hopes, dreams, fears and business plans for VR, AR, games, crypto, web, IOT, and beyond. You can’t go wrong with a word that includes everything.

Well, actually, you can.

Rather than arguing about which imagination of The Metaverse we’re talking about or which is right, let’s add a few more descriptive words based on similar Greek and Latin roots, depicting the different flavors (or perhaps phases) of these ideas.

We can see some notable examples of most of these Seven Major Verses out in the wild today. There’s a big red target on the middle of the chart right now. But we could be thinking bigger, aiming farther out.

Our Levels of Versality gradually increase in difficulty from today and require progressively more and more sophisticated approaches to the given problem set. We are not at all required to explore the space in the order…