@jupiter_rowland @fediversenews the term 'metaverse' at least goes back to Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' in 1992 and people have been trying to make it happen since around the same time. SGi's VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language) matured at about the same time as HTML 0.9 and there were a few attempts at making it work, but it pretty much died with SGI.