Welcome to the Metaverse

Something of extreme significance to Virtual Reality happened today in the news…

Sweden is to become the first country to establish diplomatic representation in the virtual reality world of Second Life, officials said.

“We are planning to establish a Swedish embassy in Second Life primarily as an information portal for Sweden,” Swedish Institute (SI) director Olle Waestberg has told AFP.

The embassy would not provide passports or visas but would instruct visitors how to obtain such documents in the real world and act as a link to web-based information about the Scandinavian country.

It will be the first officially-sanctioned embassy in a virtual world. The Metaverse, a phrase coined by cyberpunk fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his book “Snow Crash” as a successor to the Internet, constitutes Stephenson’s vision of how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the near future. Previous and concurrent efforts to develop virtual reality into the Metaverse of Stephenson’s vision have not been taken seriously, but now… with not only the Entertainment industry taking Second Life seriously (the Sundance Film Festival was recently screened in-world), but also the governments of nations taking an official interest for the first time, we must consider that Second Life is taking the steps to make the Metaverse a reality.