Author Matthew Ball offers a thorough and provocative overview of the Metaverse technological stack as well as the societal and economic drivers that he thinks will influence its progress in his book The Metaverse and How It Will Revolutionize Everything. The book offers an accessible and important reference to the strategic, technical, and philosophical foundations of the Metaverse as well as the trends and developments that are influencing current thought. It is both a historical account and a future-focused work.
Ball, a well-known essayist on the subject, is the managing partner of EpyllionCo, which manages an early-stage business fund, and the former head of strategy at Amazon Studios.
Ball has bylines at the New York Times, The Economist, and Bloomberg and has been featured in those journals as well as The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Washington Post, Financial Times, and others. He occasionally contributes to The Economist.
Three sections make up the structure of the book: What the Metaverse is, how it is being built, and how it will revolutionise everything are the first three questions.
In the first section, a historical account of the Metaverse’s conceptual inception and the essential supporting technologies – the personal computer, the internet, mobile phones, strategic video games, and virtual and augmented reality – are given. The technical obstacles, breakthroughs, and bottlenecks that must be overcome in order to completely materialise the Metaverse as defined by Ball are discussed in length in the second section. The use cases that might be considered in section three as well as the governance issues that might arise with widespread adoption are discussed. “Metaverse is the latest catchphrase, but few know what it means. The promise of the Metaverse and how it fits into the technological evolution from personal computer to the internet to mobile computing are laid forth in Matthew Ball’s thorough thesis, along with just as importantly the problems that must be overcome.
Anyone who wishes to comprehend the possibilities of the Metaverse should start by reading this book which helps differentiate between truth and hype,” stated co-founder and co-CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings.
