What happened to the metaverse?

Decoder with Nilay Patel

This week I’m talking to Matthew Ball, who was last on the show in 2022 to talk about his book “The Metaverse: How it Will Revolutionize Everything.” It’s 2024 and it’s safe to say that has not happened yet. But Matt’s still on the case — in fact he just released an almost complete update of the book, now with the much more sober title, “Building the Spatial Internet.”

Matt and I talked a lot about where the previous metaverse hype cycle landed us, and what there is to learn from these boom and bust waves. We talked about the Apple Vision Pro quite a bit; if you read or watched my review when it came out, you’ll know I think the Vision Pro is almost an end point for one set of technologies. I wanted to know if Matt felt the same and what needs to happen to make all of this more mainstream and accessible.

Links:

• Fully revised and updated edition to the “The Metaverse” | W.W. Norton
• Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not | The Verge
• Apple’s Vision Pro: five months later | Vergecast
• Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball | Decoder
• Interviewing Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth on the Metaverse, VR/AR, AI | Matthew Ball
• Interviewing Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and author Neal Stephenson | Matthew Ball
• An Interview with Matthew Ball about Vision Pro and the state of gaming | Stratechery
• Tim Sweeney explains how the metaverse might actually work | The Verge
• Fortnite is winning the metaverse | The Verge
• Is the Metaverse Just Marketing? | NYT

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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