Making the Metaverse

Programmers out there are actually creating the metaverse, but clearly in no time at all it is going to have as big an effect on how we think and behave as the physical world in which we find ourselves—so hopefully the programmers hard at work on the world of bits and bytes are heeding the decades of environmental psych research that’s out there—studies done to date indicate that we respond to virtual type meta-stimuli in the same ways that we do comparable real-life ones.

As Debra Kamin details in “The Next Hot Housing Market Is Out of This World,  It’s In the Metaverse,” (The New York Times, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/19/realestate/metaverse-vr-housing-market.html), “the metaverse [is] a catchall phrase for the growing conglomerate of immersive digital worlds where avatars work, play and purchase goods. Pixelated parcels of land are being bought, sold and built upon in a market now withy $1.4 billion,  making the metaverse a new frontier for real estate builders and investors. . . . now, in addition to billboards and burger joints for avatars, homes are being constructed on these parcels of land. They don’t offer shelter or a place to sleep. But they do offer our increasingly online selves a place to gather. . . . Some online worlds present a digital map of the earth, allowing buyers to purchase places or coordinates that hold sentimental or historic value.”