There's already things that look like a metaverse in games like Pokemon Go. Remember those videos from 2016 of hundreds of people in central park all running towards a rare pokemon spawn? That's a shared virtual world overlaid on top of the real world, through a cell phone game.<p>But nobody really thinks Pokemon Go is that revolutionary, and certainly not deserving of the title "Metaverse".<p>It's the same problem as with Artificial Intelligence. There was a whole bunch of AI hype that began around the proliferation of deep neural nets, but nothing that people recognize as an artificial intelligence in the sense that you see in movies or read in books (i.e. an AGI). So much for that intelligence explosion.<p>Any metaverse is going to be limited by the tools that tie it to the real world. For the most part this is GPS to determine coordinates, and cell phone to run relatively lightweight computations and render to a display. If you're really fancy (like Google), you can have people point their cameras at buildings to determine where on the street the person is standing exactly (Google Live View). None of these things feel futuristic, so they'll never fit the layman's idea of a Metaverse (which is, roughly, a virtual world overlaid 1:1 on top of the real world. Not 1:1 on top of a GPS coordinate system).