By now，you've likely heard of the metaverse（元宇宙）.
Last month, Mark Zuckerberg sent everyone running to their dictionaries to figure out what he was talking about when he said Facebook was changing its name to Meta and declared the metaverse not only the future for his company, but the future for the Internet.
Actually, the word and concept aren't new. Neal Stephenson made up the term in his 1991 science-fiction book Snow Crash，in which people use avatars（分身）to explore an online world. A number of small metaverses have since developed, where people can do many real life things—like working out, meeting with colleagues, or taking a class—but all online and through a pair of eyeglasses that costs around $ 3, 500 and other more expensive equipment.
"They are virtual worlds where you feel like you're inside a cool video game. But it's so much more than a game because it's like the Internet, where you're socially connected and you can do almost anything in the metaverse, "said Jason Moore who teaches virtual art at Brooklyn College and spends a couple of hours in the metaverse every day. "There are currently a handful of mostly unconnected metaverse platforms, including VRChat, NeosVR, and my studio at the college. "
He hopes that cheaper equipment and faster Internet connections might put it within mainstream applications like tourism and provide us with the most powerful educational tool ever invented within a couple of years.
But Frances Haugen, a former Google's designer, warns that metaverses could harm personal calculation skills and further divide societies as each user stays in their own virtual realities. She is also worried that they are likely to become more addictive than the current social media and rob people of more personal information.