this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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Technology

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Metaverse inventor Neal Stephenson says VR goggles are dead (www.theregister.com)
submitted 1 week ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Science fiction author Neal Stephenson, who coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has argued he and others who believed immersive environments would require head-mounted hardware got it wrong.

In a post penned to mark Meta’s recent decision to end its work on the Metaverse after blowing through $80 billion, Stephenson said that twenty years ago, when he worked at virtual reality hardware company Magic Leap, he would ask “Do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands?”

“At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no,” he wrote. Now he thinks that another 20 years into the future, devices like smartphones will still dominate. “Or at least that is the case if the only alternative is wearing things on their faces.”

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[–] Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Do you really think that twenty years from now everyone is still going to be going around all day staring at little rectangles in their hands? At the time it seemed obvious to me that the answer was no,”

So this guy made the same prediction once already and was completely wrong

"When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, on the other hand, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not,” he wrote. “Likewise, when someone holds up their phone and aims it at you, it’s obvious that you are on camera. That’s not true in the case of glasses or goggles. So it’s creepy.”

Never heard of sunglasses? Creeps have been using them to covertly ogle strangers in public for generations now, and yet the majority of people own and use them.

This guy is a fucking moron.