The grand metaverse that tech enthusiasts talked up last year remains a distant goal for the industry, but this week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas showed off a few of its building blocks as they begin to materialize.
Why it matters: The full vision of a shared, 3D digital dimension a la "Ready Player One" is probably still a decade away but it won't arrive out of nowhere in one piece. Instead, it will show up in bits and chunks, clunky and disjointed, before coalescing into something both functional and useful.
Here are notable examples of CES' steps toward a metaverse:
Be smart: Most visions of a metaverse imagine an immersive digital space shared by many companies and individuals. Meta's Andrew Bosworth has described it as the embodied internet.
Yes, but: There was also a lot of just plain buzz and hype, applying the word "metaverse" to anything remotely related to virtual or augmented reality.
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