The Metaverse is coming.

There's no turning around, we're going to go there.

Most forecasts believe that the Metaverse by the end of the decade will be between $6 and $13 trillion.

There's confusion and/or disagreement as to exactly what it is, what it requires, when it arrives.

I think many people have heard the term 'metaverse' over the past year with the idea that society's going to transform.

The Metaverse is not an all-encompassing clear vision of the future-it is an ambition, it's a hypothesis.

At its core, the Metaverse should be understood as a fourth wave of computing and networking.

The first was the Mainframe era- most of us think about IBM supercomputers- that was succeeded by personal computing and the internet, succeeded in turn by the mobile and cloud era.

But we, as a society, as people, Homo sapiens, did not evolve for thousands of years to interact with 2D interfaces, we didn't evolve to learn by tapping a piece of glass.

That arc leaves many to believe that the next evolution is 3D experiences.

My name's Matthew Ball, I'm the CEO and founder of Epyllion.

I'm also the author of "The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything."

It's sometimes helpful to explain what the Metaverse is not.

First, it's not just immersive virtual reality, or what many consider a virtual reality headset.

It's also not a video game.

We see now hundreds of millions of people spending their lives, their friendships, inside 3D-rendered social and virtual worlds.

But of course, the Metaverse is a combination of many different technologies, and it is not just for a game.

It will not replace the internet, it will build iteratively on top of it.

But, it's not fully predictable.

Much like there was no technical understanding in 1995 that told you exactly what life would be right now on the Internet.

Facebook, or now Meta, was born of the PC era, and became far more valuable and successful in the mobile era.

The reason for this is 'recursive technology.'

Someone invents a new technology, and that new technology is responded to by consumers and developers who build new things or use that technology in ways that are predicted and not predicted.

I define the Metaverse as: A massively-scaled and interoperable network of real-time-rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users each with an individual sense of presence; while supporting continuity of data, such as history, identity, communications, payments, entitlements, and objects.

Should I redo that?

Massively-scaled is one of the easier elements of my Metaverse definition, and that largely observes that the internet would not be the internet if it just had 20 websites.

The term itself comes from dystopic science fiction coined by Neal Stephenson in 1992.

And it refers to 'meta,' a Greek term, as in "greater than or encompassing all verses"- all individual virtual worlds and experiences as a subunit.

But describing the number of dimensions or the visual aesthetic of a virtual world reflects just one element.

A virtual world is really any computer-simulated and rendered virtual space.

It can be immersive, which is what you would think of as a VR headset.

It can be an augmented reality, in text, in 2D.

Or it could be in three dimensions, like a "Super Mario" or "Legend of Zelda" game made today.

3D is a key specification because at its core, the Metaverse is talking about a parallel plane of existence, a second place where we can live and coexist and socialize.

And by the way, we may come to find that the term 'metaverse' does creep into really any socially-focused 3D-rendered experience.

We typically identify platforms such as "Minecraft" or "Roblox" or "Fortnite."

Some go as far as saying "Call of Duty" or "Legend of Zelda" which are narrative, non-generative experiences are metaverses, but the technical, academic, and mainstream definition: it's the definite article, The Metaverse, not A Metaverse, and certainly not Metaverses.