> With the “metaverse”, you clear out a space around you, strap a heavy thing on your head, and shut yourself into an artificial environment. After the first oohs and aahs, you enter a VR chat room… And realize the thing on your head adds absolutely nothing to the interaction.

It doesn't if you use it as just a chat room. For some people it does add a lot, though.

The "metaverse" as in Active Worlds, Second Life, VR Chat, our own Overte, etc has been around for a long time and does have an user base that likes using it.

What I'm not too sure about is it having mass appeal, at least just yet. To me it's a bit of a specialized area, like chess. It's of great interest to some and very little to most of the population. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with places like chess.com existing.

I don’t have a problem with chess.com existing, but if someone starts shouting loudly about how chess.com is going to be the future of everything, and that I’ll need to buy a bunch of expensive-but-still-kinda-crappy hardware to participate in the inevitable chess.com-based society, and that we need to ground-up rearchitect computing to treat chess as fundamental component of UI… well, it just gets a little tiresome.

AI has the same vague hand-wavey problems of the metaverse. LLMs are not AI. Roblox is not the metaverse. Both are approaching parts of the promise of each of their potential, but only a small part of what they could be or are promised to be.

Hype cycles will hype. Builders will build.