Editing Metaverse (section)

=== ''Snow Crash'', 1992 ===
{{quote box|So Hiro's not actually here at all. He's in a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones. In the lingo, this imaginary place is known as the Metaverse. Hiro spends a lot of time in the Metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.
| author = [[Neal Stephenson]]
| source = ''[[Snow Crash]]'' (1992).<ref name="Snow Crash">{{cite book |title=Snow Crash |first=Neal |last=Stephenson |author-link=Neal Stephenson |date=1992 |isbn=9780553351927 |publisher=Bantam Books |page=22}}</ref>
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| width = 20%
}}

The term ''metaverse'' was coined by [[Neal Stephenson]] in his 1992 [[science fiction]] novel ''[[Snow Crash]]'', where humans, represented by computer-generated [[Avatar (computing)|avatars]], interact with each other and [[software agent]]s, in a [[3D computer graphics|three-dimensional]] virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Grimshaw|first=Mark|title=The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2014|isbn=9780199826162|location=New York|page=702}}</ref> Stephenson used the term to describe a [[virtual reality|virtual-reality]]-based successor to the [[internet]].<ref>In the acknowledgments section following the text of ''Snow Crash'', Stephenson writes: ''The words "avatar" (in the sense it is used here) and "Metaverse" are my inventions, which I came up with when I decided that existing words (such as "virtual reality") were simply too awkward to use.''</ref>

Neal Stephenson's metaverse appears to its users as an [[Urban area|urban]] environment developed along a 100-meter-wide road, called the Street, which spans the entire [[1 E7 m|65,536&nbsp;km]] (2<sup>16</sup> km) circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet. The virtual [[real estate]] is owned by the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, a fictional part of the real [[Association for Computing Machinery]], and is available to be bought and buildings developed thereupon.<ref name=":13">{{Cite book|last=Neal.|first=Stephenson|url=http://worldcat.org/oclc/799825166|title=Snow crash|date=2007|publisher=Rizzoli|isbn=978-88-17-01682-7|oclc=799825166}}</ref>

Users of the metaverse access it through personal terminals that project a high-quality virtual reality display onto goggles worn by the user, or from grainy [[black and white]] public terminals in booths. The users experience it from a [[First person (video games)|first-person perspective]]. Stephenson describes a [[sub-culture]] of people choosing to remain continuously connected to the metaverse; they are given the sobriquet "[[gargoyle (monster)|gargoyle]]s" due to their grotesque appearance.<ref name=":13" />

Within the metaverse, individual users appear as avatars of any form, with the sole restriction of height, "to prevent people from walking around a mile high". Transport within the metaverse is limited to analogs of reality by foot or vehicle, such as the [[monorail]] that runs the entire length of the Street, stopping at 256 ''Express Ports'', located evenly at 256&nbsp;km intervals, and ''Local Ports'', one kilometer apart.<ref name=":13" />