My guess as to what will concretely emerge is protocols/standards for things like 3D user avatars and world hopping, so that worlds hosted by anyone can be linked up, rather than only uploaded to a proprietary game with rules/technical limitations decided by the game's devs. The "Metaverse" would be to 3D environments what the Web is to HTML pages.

But the article's "Ask 50 people what the metaverse means, right now, and you’ll get 50 different answers" is very true. I have no idea if this is what Facebook or Epic Games have in mind.

Nothing. No metaverse concept differs from second Life other than better graphics and less loading pains. VR also ist just a visual layer.

I'm thinking of it like Amazon's mechanical turk.. where you become enslaved to do work and solve tasks in a virtual world for fractions of pennies in the form of credits you can't pay your rent with. Zero point one star.

Neal Stephenson wrote a novel (Reamde) about pretty much that exact scenario - companies putting mechanical turkish tasks into an mmo-type interface for players to grind out digital currency.

Makes you wonder if Zuck read it and was like "this sounds like a great idea".

This is also reality for some in second Life and wow too. Hence why they are great examples