The other night, I had an odd conversation with ChatGPT, made somewhat stranger because the AI's answers came out of a humanoid rabbit idly sucking on a juice box. He was standing alone in a virtual novelty store in Second Life, where he had recently been fired. The rabbit, the shop owner explained to me later, was meant to be a clerk, "but he kept trying to sell items that were not for sale." So the rabbit had been demoted to the role of greeter, chatting with customers about the nature of comedy, his own existence, or whatever else they cared to ask. BunnyGPT is among the first bots in the virtual world to have its "mind" wired to OpenAI's large language model.

On 14 November 2006, 5,000 IBM employees assembled in a digital recreation of the 15th-century Chinese imperial palace known as the Forbidden City. They had come to hear IBM's CEO, Sam Palmisano, deliver a speech. Palmisano's physical body was in Beijing at the time, but he addressed most of his audience inside Second Life, the online social world that had launched three years earlier. Palmisano's trim avatar wore tortoiseshell-frame glasses and a tailored pinstripe suit. He faced a crowd of digital, animated dolls dressed in the business attire of the day: black heels, pencil-line shirts, Windsor-knotted ties. Looming out of the throng at the back stood a 10ft IBM employee, his digital face plastered in Gene Simmons-style white makeup, with shoulder-length, Sonic-blue hair. It was a historic moment, a journalist for Bloomberg reported at the time: Palmisano was "the first big-league CEO" to stage a company-wide meeting in Second Life – "the most popular of a handful of new-fangled 3D online virtual worlds". IBM, just like any other denizen of Second Life, paid ground rent to own a "region" of the game, one region representing 6.5 hectares of digital turf, currently rented at $166 (£134) a month.

Metaverse is composed of two words: Meta Verse. To better understand the complex topic of the metaverse, it is worth looking at the etymological origin of the ancient Greek word "meta". Its original meaning is "beyond," transcending, "after," or "behind". Metaphysics, Metacognition are some words that use the prefix "Meta". Metacognition, for example, means to have an awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes.

You've probably forgotten how hard it was to operate a personal computer in 1994. It's possible you were little or hadn't been born yet. Outside of the Mac was a terrifying mess. Windows version 3.0 was text-based (command/prompt). Early Internet users needed a combination of programs to get onto the web.