The year is 2030. A 5 year old Timmy is bored and demands attention from his mother, currently hooked in VR doing her remote job. She excuses herself for a moment, straps Timmy into a special harness and puts his VR goggles on. Timmy is now in a virtual playground with other kids his age. All his movements, especially facial expressions, are reproduced in virtual reality. There's an option to use an automatically generated avatar that sort-of reproduces how Timmy looks, but he can also look like a cartoon character.
His mother is happy - she doesn't have to drive him to a kindergarten and he stops impacting her work.
There are early brain implants that greatly expand immersion, but they are so expensive they are limited to multimillionaire nerds.
2040. Overwhelming majority of kids in developed nations attend virtual schools in VR. Brain implants got better and cheaper, allowing full virtual body control. They are now within financial reach of the upper 20%, not just a tiny financial elite. They start to be required in professional settings as they greatly increase efficiency, with companies sometimes funding them for their employers on a payment plan.
2050. An entire generation now greatly prefers communication in VR to real world interactions and self-identifies more with whatever they chose as their avatars rather than with their real body. Their friend networks are global - quite possibly they don't have any friends within 100km. They spend overwhelming majority of their waking time in metaverse. Brain implants are ubiquitous in people below 40, with most expensive versions allowing a full dive experience.
Most of physical work happens in metaverse, with workers controlling humanoid robots remotely. It's not perfect yet - but it's getting there.
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Compared to the growth of 2d internet, metaverse is now in early 90s. There's no need to buy a vr kit right now - but once facial expressions tracking arrives it's time do it, otherwise you risk permanently losing touch with the zeitgeist.
The year is 2030. A 5 year old Timmy is bored and demands attention from his mother, currently hooked in VR doing her remote job. She excuses herself for a moment, straps Timmy into a special harness and puts his VR goggles on. Timmy is now in a virtual playground with other kids his age. All his movements, especially facial expressions, are reproduced in virtual reality. There's an option to use an automatically generated avatar that sort-of reproduces how Timmy looks, but he can also look like a cartoon character. His mother is happy - she doesn't have to drive him to a kindergarten and he stops impacting her work. There are early brain implants that greatly expand immersion, but they are so expensive they are limited to multimillionaire nerds.
2040. Overwhelming majority of kids in developed nations attend virtual schools in VR. Brain implants got better and cheaper, allowing full virtual body control. They are now within financial reach of the upper 20%, not just a tiny financial elite. They start to be required in professional settings as they greatly increase efficiency, with companies sometimes funding them for their employers on a payment plan.
2050. An entire generation now greatly prefers communication in VR to real world interactions and self-identifies more with whatever they chose as their avatars rather than with their real body. Their friend networks are global - quite possibly they don't have any friends within 100km. They spend overwhelming majority of their waking time in metaverse. Brain implants are ubiquitous in people below 40, with most expensive versions allowing a full dive experience.
Most of physical work happens in metaverse, with workers controlling humanoid robots remotely. It's not perfect yet - but it's getting there.
---
Compared to the growth of 2d internet, metaverse is now in early 90s. There's no need to buy a vr kit right now - but once facial expressions tracking arrives it's time do it, otherwise you risk permanently losing touch with the zeitgeist.