Artificial Intelligence
What Is the Metaverse: Dead Hype or Slow-Burning Reality?
In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook 'Meta' and announced a trillion-dollar bet on virtual worlds. Four years later, Meta's Reality Labs has accumulated more than $83 billion in cumulative operating losses. And yet: VR headset usage is growing, enterprise adoption in training and design is real, and the underlying technologies — spatial computing, persistent digital environments, real-time 3D rendering — are maturing. So is the metaverse dead, or did the concept just collide with an overhyped timeline?