Welcome to The Inquiry, I'm Charmaine Cozier, each week four expert witnesses, one question,

and an answer.

A card game is about to begin in space. The players are in a vast room with bright white walls

and furniture, the floor is made of glass. One of the group taps his wrist to video call a friend

on planet Earth, she sends a link to street art painted on a brick wall. He opens it and it

transforms to a huge 3D sculpture. The card players float in and around it, because they're avatars.

The cartoon-like digital creations include a rust red robot wearing a green polka

deal of eyes and a 37-year-old man wearing dark jeans and a grey t-shirt.

His name is Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook and one of the richest men in the world.

It's all part of a video presentation of his vision for the future of the internet.

We'll be able to express ourselves a new joyful, completely immersive ways and that's going to

unlock a lot of amazing new experiences. He's spending billions of dollars in creating

thousands of jobs to make it happen. We call this the Metaverse and you're going to be able to do

almost anything you can imagine. And he's even changed his parent company's name from Facebook

to Meta. So this week we're asking what is the Metaverse and why is Facebook so obsessed with it?

Part 1. Brave New World

The exact definition is really hard to pin down. As originally, the Metaverse was something

used in a novel called Snow Crash, which was basically an alternate virtual world to the real

one that you could go travel to and be someone else. Avibar Zeeve co-created the technology

behind Second Life, the virtual avatar filled online world, which was released 18 years ago.

Since then, he's developed new technologies for Apple, Microsoft, Disney, Amazon,

and co-founded the original company behind the app that we now know as Google Earth.

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