Mike Sellers points out some of the same flaws in the metaverse analogy mentioned in Meshverse 101
overall, I think the vision of the unified 3D-Web-Metaverse is one rooted in the past, not looking to the future. … it’s not the “3D Web.” It’s not the Web as one big virtual world, or loading down typical web sites with the overhead of 3D spaces and expecting avatars to walk from one to another. The sooner we free ourselves from that fictional, limiting, inapplicable, 20th Century concept (and stop promoting it in the mainstream media), the sooner we’ll have a good chance of inventing the future, rather than being stuck trying to re-invent a vision from the past.
While I think the Business Week article Just Ahead: The Web As Virtual World which triggered Seller’s post, is a bit more balanced than he describes, there’s no question that it(inevitably) falls into the same morass of inadequate and/or misappropriated terminology. Although there are many sites/organizations/conferences with metaverse in their names, it’s still possible to establish a more accurate and useful term like meshverse. Interestingly one of the commenters to Seller’s post notes:
It means that as new tools develop, we’ll be able to intelligently mesh 2D and 3D to gain the unique advantages of each, in the appropriate context.(emphasis mine)
and others said that the roadmap crowd didn’t really equate “metaverse” with “the 3D web” so it would seem we’re moving in the right direction.
