Matthew Ball explains the significance of the metaverse in new book
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Over the past four years, Matthew Ball, CEO of investment firm Epyllion and the former global head of strategy for Amazon Studios, has been a leading thinker on the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. And today, his book debuts: The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything.
As we slouched toward the pandemic, Ball wrote a timely and prophetic piece in early 2019 about Fortnite‘s opportunity to become a metaverse. The idea gathered steam at the beginning of COVID-19, as we were all forced into lockdown and had no way to socialize with each other except through games. Boring Zoom calls made us all long for something better, and that took us back to ideas that sci-fi author Neal Stephenson raised with his original Snow Crash book. And it turns out that Ball and many others believe the metaverse is moving from science fiction to reality as it becomes the next internet.
In June 2021, he tied a lot of that all together in a 30,000-word piece dubbed Metaverse Primer. That only prompted him to get started on a book where he defines the metaverse, describes its significance, and predicts how it will roll out in the future. He also came up with a way to invest in the metaverse through a project he did with others dubbed the Metaverse ETF.
Ball is an optimist about the metaverse, but he constantly brings up complicated arguments about what could slow it down or speed it up. The need for real-time communication and low-latency technology is just one of the
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