The term "metaverse" originally appears in Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel "Snow Crash" in 1992. The story takes place in a futuristic scenario in which humans interact with software agents as avatars in an internet-like and online-enabled virtual space. This virtual universe was dubbed the metaverse by Stephenson, and it reflected his view of the internet's future evolution based on virtual reality technology. The potential of building and executing a three-dimensional virtual environment for mass consumption has piqued the interest of technology industry players and movers. The first Metaverse Roadmap Summit, held in May 2007, predicted that by 2016, the internet would have evolved into an all-encompassing digital playground, immersing people in a wealth of freely available and on-demand digital knowledge. Microsoft's Robert Scoble, former Sony Online Entertainment chief creative officer Raph Koster, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center's Bob Moore, and game creator Randy Farmer are among the attendees. The summit finished with four hypothetical metaverse scenarios or their most likely augmented reality, lifelogging, virtual worlds, and mirror worlds.
In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had changed its name to Metaverse Platforms, indicating that the corporation was moving away from being regarded as a mere social media platform and toward implementing its own version of the metaverse. The company wants to create a hybrid of current online social experiences that can be stretched into three dimensions or projected into the real world.