the most crowded of regions. Large screen displays offering life-size avatars; photorealistic environments, simulated down to the smallest blade of grass; cameras that watch your real life body for movements that can be mapped onto your avatar: all these things make immersion more complete and more immediate than it’s ever been before. 3D immersion glasses also have a following, but the tabloids have had a field day with research linking them to headaches and occasional epileptic seizures. It’s not at all the technology that’s had the biggest impact on mass uptake, however: the metaverse’s redesign is acknowledged as being largely responsible for that. In the end, all it took was for someone to look at successful social media and actually apply what had been learned there to virtual worlds like SL. For example, there were certain things that most new Facebook users ‘got’, even before they’d logged on to the network for the very first time; the most powerful of these was the understanding that everyone on Facebook had their own space where you could find out things about them. In the 2D world of the web this space was understood to be a web page. In the 3D world of the metaverse, therefore, it was
realized that this had to be some sort of three dimensional place that represented in some customizable way the person it belonged to. In the new, successful, metaverse, then, signup takes you straight to your very own place. For free. The notion that having any sort of a home is a luxury residents should pay for has been identified as an unworkable business model; instead, everyone gets a free place of a certain size and money is required to make it bigger. You start off with a default house and small garden that you can customize to your heart’s content and if you want a bigger area, then you pay. Simple. And if you want your own space to be something promotional while renting to actually live in someone else’s space (or have residences in a number of different spaces) then that is just fine too. It’s no longer a single cyberworld, then, as SL was. But SL was never really a single world in any case. Few people actually walked or flew from region to region in the days of SL; teleportation was, of course, the norm—and, in the case of private sims, essential. Naturally, you can still teleport from place to place in metaverse 2023— let’s call it ‘Huckverse’ for future retrospective patenting