From Minecraft to Zoom calls, we've all spent much of the pandemic on our screens. But are we ready for the metaverse?

You might not know this, but the metaverse is coming. Where you can live a life that expands on reality and can approach hyperrealism. I just took my next big step toward embracing it – and soon you may, too. Within a matter of minutes, I was reborn as a holographic avatar – a digital version of me – with the help of the Avatar Dimension technicians in northern Virginia, just west of the nation's capital. My virtual doppelgänger is ready to embark on digital adventures, be inserted into a video game, a movie or virtual reality. And it's ready for the metaverse, the persistent alternate reality in cyberspace author Neal Stephenson envisioned in his 1992 science fiction novel "Snow Crash."