If you feel confused by the whole "metaverse" thing, you are definitely not alone. Elon Musk, the richest person on the planet, seems to be struggling to wrap his head around the new concept as well.
Musk reacted with the popular laughing crying emoji to a tweet posted by Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus about how no one seems to be able to explain what metaverse is about.
The term "metaverse," which was first mentioned in Neal Stephenson's sci-fi novel "Snow Crash," has become one of the top buzzwords of 2021 after tech giant Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta in a massive rebrand, which also pushed the prices of cryptocurrencies of the likes of Decentraland (MANA) sharply higher.
The futuristic idea of living in an alternative world/computer-generated simulation has now become mainstream, with billionaires vying to take people beyond their reality.
We might already live in a simulation
Last month, in response to a tweet about Pong, Musk implied that we might already be living in a hyper-realistic computer simulation based on the progress of gaming:
49 years later, games are photo-realistic 3D worlds. What does that trend continue to imply about our reality?
This December, the gaming community was blown away by The Matrix Awakens demo that has blurred boundaries between cinema and video games, with its phenomenal ultrarealistic graphics powered by Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5.
Musk's ideas were inspired by the seminal 2003 paper of Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom, which argued that there is a high chance of humans being conscious characters who live within a computer simulation.