Mark Zuckerberg's dream is not all there is to the Metaverse

The possibility of its existence might never materialize, or perhaps we're already there.

The Metaverse is one of the biggest investments made by the company formerly known as Facebook.

Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, hyped an already existing term in October when he renamed the company to Meta and led viewers on a thrilling journey into the future.

"The Metaverse," however, is a much greater (and even more complicated) concept. Originating in science fiction, it has evolved into a term for merging physical and virtual worlds.

Among them are virtual and augmented reality headsets; 3D virtual worlds such as Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft; and decentralized Web3 services, including cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

It's not clear how many people are actually living in the metaverse yet. Many proponents of the term lack a single definition or estimate of how large it is.

Despite Meta's big investments in platform development, other companies have already built metaverse-style platforms, some of them even years before Facebook even existed, like Second Life developer Linden Lab.

Here, we delve into the uncertainty of 2021's technology's most ubiquitous buzzword and why it might not be what these companies had anticipated.