Avi Bar-Zeev has been working on the metaverse for 30 years. He’s one of the key people behind Microsoft’s Hololens, co-founded Keyhole which became Google Earth, helped define Second Life’s technology, and has worked with Apple on, presumably, its rumored smartglasses.

In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Ari about the metaverse, what it is, what it isn’t, and how AR and VR connect (if they do).

We also talk about what AR should be, about how it could fail, and the very real dangers it could represent. 

We discuss the one absolute necessity of the metaverse: interoperability. We ask whether a visual metaphor for the presentation of information is just unnecessary most of the time. We also we explore the future of life in an augmented reality rich environment, and the privacy implications of the metaverse.

0:00 Virtual enslavement

0:25 What is the metaverse?

4:52 Lessons of Hololens

7:05 Dangers of augmented reality

11:26 VR, the metaverse, and interoperability

14:22 Visual metaphors and metaverse

17:21 AR vs VR: convergence?

22:13 Life in the metaverse

26:10 Admin privs to your reality

28:07 Building the future

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