This book is the result of a review, expansion, and reorganization of all my previous writings on the metaverse.
The core purpose of this book is to provide a clear, comprehensive, and credible definition of the metaverse, a concept still in its infancy.
Going a little further, I hope this book will help you understand what it takes to realize the metaverse, why every generation will ultimately move into and live in it, and how it will completely transform our daily lives, work, and mindset.
I believe the combined value of these changes will be in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Where do you stand in this huge wave?
---From “[Starting] Steve Jobs, the man who arrived in the future before Elon Musk, page 36”

Technological change is difficult to predict because it is not caused by a single invention, innovation, or individual, but rather requires numerous changes to occur together for a realistic transition to occur.
When a new technology is born, society and individual inventors respond by taking new actions and creating new products.
This in turn leads to new use cases utilizing the underlying technology, which in turn triggers further actions and creations, and the process is repeated thereafter.

---From “[Chapter 2] Chaos, the Essential Element of Destruction, p. 73”

The metaverse will not replace or fundamentally change the Internet's basic architecture or protocol suite.
Instead, it will evolve toward building a unique environment based on existing Internet technologies.
Let's think about the 'current state' of the Internet.
We say we live in the age of mobile internet, but most internet traffic is still transmitted via wired cables.
The same goes for data transferred from one mobile device to another.
Moreover, most Internet traffic runs on standards, protocols, and formats that were designed decades ago.
Although standards, protocols, and formats have all evolved, the way they are implemented has not changed.
We're still using software and hardware (like Windows or Microsoft Office) designed for the early days of the Internet.
Although this software and hardware has evolved since then, it is largely unchanged from decades ago.
However, the 'mobile internet era' is different from the wired internet era that dominated the 1990s and early 2000s.
We now use different types of software (mostly apps, rather than general-purpose software or web browsers) for different purposes, on different devices (manufactured by different companies), in new places.
---From “[Chapter 4] What Comes After the Internet, p. 135”

Earlier in this book, I mentioned the supercomputer built by Pixar for the production of the 2013 film "Monsters University."
The supercomputer is made up of about 2,000 industrial computers connected together, each with 24,000 combined cores.
Pixar spent tens of millions of dollars building this data center—far more than the price of a single PlayStation—but it allowed them to produce much larger, more detailed, and more beautiful images.
In total, it took 30 core hours to render each of the movie's 120,000 frames.
The following year, Pixar replaced many of its computers and cores with newer, more powerful processors.
Pixar could have used increased computer power to render the same scene faster, but they chose to make the rendering more precise rather than optimizing for speed.
For example, one scene in Pixar's 2017 film Coco featured nearly 8 million individually rendered lights.
Initially, it took about 1,000 hours to render every frame of this scene, then 450 hours.
Pixar was able to reduce the time to 55 hours in part by "baking" multiple lights in 20-degree increments horizontally and vertically.
That is, the response to the camera has been reduced.
---From “[Chapter 6] Computing: One Event Is Not Enough, p. 176”

Let's recall Tim Sweeney's warning about the scope of the metaverse.
“The metaverse is more powerful than anything else and will penetrate far more broadly.
“If a single company were to seize central control of the metaverse, it would become a god on earth more powerful than any government.” This statement may sound like an exaggeration, and it may indeed be.
But we already worry that the five biggest tech companies—Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook—each worth trillions of dollars, will control our digital lives, influencing how we think and what we buy.
Most of our lives today still take place offline.
Today, hundreds of millions of people use the internet to find jobs and get things done on their iPhones, but they don't do everything literally within iOS or by building iOS content.
When your child attends school classes via Zoom, they access Zoom and the school website via an iPad or Mac, but the school itself does not run on the iOS platform.
In the West, e-commerce currently accounts for 20-30 percent of retail spending, but most of this spending is spent on purchasing physical goods, and retail transactions account for only 6 percent of the e-commerce economy.
What if we move into the metaverse? What if some corporations were to run the physics, real estate, tariff policies, currency, and government of a second dimension where humanity exists? Perhaps Sweeney's warnings are no longer simply exaggerated.
---From “[Chapter 7] Virtual World Engine: This World Is All Fake, p. 222”

In short, Roblox has enriched the digital world and transformed hundreds of thousands of people into new digital creators, but it hasn't been immune to losses.
For every $100 of value Roblox realizes on mobile devices, it loses $30, developers earn $25 in net revenue (before all development costs are deducted), and Apple pockets about $30 in net revenue without taking any risk.
Today, the only way Roblox can increase developer revenue is to either take further losses or halt research and development, which could harm both Roblox and its developers in the long run.
---From “[Chapter 10] Payment Channels: The End of Consumption as We Know It, p. 333”

I hope the metaverse will usher in a 'competition to build trust.'
Major platforms are investing billions of dollars to attract developers, making their platforms simpler, cheaper, and faster to build better, more profitable virtual goods, spaces, and worlds.
But they are showing a renewed interest in how policies can demonstrate that they are worthy of being partners, not just distributors or platforms.
While this approach has always been considered a good business strategy, it has emerged as a central priority today, as building the metaverse requires massive investment and developer trust.
---From “[Chapter 14] Winners and Losers, p. 472”

It's natural to worry about a future where people are stuck at home wearing VR headsets and never go out.
But such concerns ignore the context.
For example, in the United States, about 300 million people watch video for an average of 5 hours and 30 minutes a day (or a total of 1.5 billion hours).
Many people watch videos alone, sitting on the sofa or lying in bed.
All of these are anti-social behaviors.
As Hollywood often boasts, video content is consumed passively (industry terminology calls it "leanback entertainment," meaning you sit back and watch).
If we could transform this screen time into social, interactive, and engaging entertainment, the continued confinement of people indoors could have a positive rather than negative effect.
This is especially true for older people.
Seniors in the United States watch an average of seven and a half hours of TV per day. Few people dream of retirement and longevity if they spend half their remaining life watching TV.
The metaverse might not be able to replicate the real-life experience of sailing the Caribbean, but it will offer a glimpse into the joys of sailing a virtual yacht with old friends, along with all sorts of digital-only benefits.
Older adults might prefer to be active in the metaverse rather than watching Fox News or MSNBC at noon.
---From “[Chapter 15] Metaverse Existence, p. 490”

The future is difficult to predict.
It's equally difficult for pioneers.
While we are currently at the dawn of the metaverse, let's take a final look back at the past era of computing and networking.
Even Internet enthusiasts would have found it difficult to imagine a future where billions of web pages would exist across millions of web servers, where 300 billion emails would be sent a day, where billions of people would use the platform daily, and where a single network called Facebook would receive 3 billion monthly visitors and over 2 billion daily visitors.

In January 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone as a revolutionary product at a product launch event.
Of course, his judgment was correct.
But the first iPhone didn't have an App Store and there were no plans to allow third-party developers to create such a feature.
Why would that be? Jobs told the developers:
“The full Safari engine is inside the iPhone.
…so you can build great Web 2.0 apps and Ajax apps that look and work exactly like the apps on the iPhone.” But in October 2007, 10 months after the iPhone was unveiled and four months after it went on sale, Jobs changed his mind.
The SDK was announced in March 2008, and the App Store was launched in July of that year.
In the month since, the roughly one million iPhone owners have downloaded 30 percent more apps than the more than 40 million iTunes users have downloaded music.
Jobs told the Wall Street Journal:
“I don’t want to trust predictions anymore.
Like everyone else, Apple has now become an observer of this amazing phenomenon, as it has so far surpassed expectations.” The path forward for the metaverse will likely be largely similar.
Whenever technological innovation occurs, consumers, developers, and entrepreneurs react to these changes.
Seemingly trivial things like cell phones, touchscreens, and video games eventually become necessities, changing the world in ways people predicted and sometimes in ingenious ways they never even imagined.

---From “[In conclusion] Everyone is just an observer, page 511”