Neal Stephenson, the science-fiction author who coined the term “Metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has criticised Meta’s push towards face-worn computing devices. In a recent blog post, Stephenson said the company’s attempts to popularise smart glasses and VR headsets, including Meta’s devices, feel “creepy” to many users and are unlikely to become mainstream. He added that the Metaverse concept itself is not dead, but Meta focused too heavily on head-mounted hardware, which made the idea harder for people to accept.
His comments come as Meta has scaled back parts of its Metaverse ambitions after spending tens of billions of dollars on the project. The pullback has raised fresh questions about why the idea struggled to take off despite years of investment. According to Stephenson, the problem was not the concept itself, but the way companies tried to build it.
In the blog post, he said the Metaverse was always meant to be a shared virtual space on the internet, but many technology companies, especially Meta, treated it as something that required goggles or glasses to exist. He argued that this narrow approach created unnecessary barriers for users.
“Once you have computers that can show graphics, and an Internet, the notion of creating a virtual online space is sort of obvious,” he wrote, suggesting the idea of Metaverse does not depend on headsets.
According to Stephenson the biggest mistake companies like Meta and Google made was assuming people would be comfortable wearing computers on their faces for long periods of time. However he suggests that face-worn devices can make people uneasy because others cannot tell what the wearer is doing. “When someone’s wearing a head-mounted display, you don’t know whether they are looking at you or not that’s creepy,” he wrote.
Further drawing from his own experience working with augmented-reality company Magic Leap, Stephenson said he once believed people would eventually stop staring at phones. He now admits that prediction was wrong. “Twenty years from now, everyone is still going to be staring at little rectangles in their hands,” he wrote, arguing that smartphones and flat screens remain the most practical way for people to access digital worlds.
Another reason, Stephenson believes headset-based platforms are struggling is because they never reached a large audience. He says that developers are unlikely to build content for devices used by only a small number of people, especially when projects can disappear if companies shut down their services. “These headsets typically have only a few thousand in circulation. That’s the whole market,” he wrote.
He added that versions of the Metaverse which do not require headsets already exist in online games such as Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft, where millions of users interact in shared virtual spaces without wearing goggles. “The only thing that differentiates them from the Metaverse is that no goggles are involved,” he said.
Stephenson noted that the Metaverse idea is not dead. However, he advised future companies planning to build around the concept to focus less on glasses and headsets, and more on creating virtual worlds that people can access easily. According tp Stepheson, instead of relying on expensive hardware, the Metaverse will likely grow from existing platforms that already have large user communities and proven use cases.
