The only technology that died more times than VR is AI, and that seems to have worked out

Background: a familiar death spiral — again

Mark Pesce argues that talk of the metaverse’s demise is melodrama. It has been reported that Neal Stephenson — the author who coined "metaverse" — recently pronounced it dead, and the timing couldn’t sting Meta more: the company has been shuffling away from Horizon Worlds. Pesce, who says he built networked consumer VR for Sega before Stephenson wrote his novel, lays out a longer view: VR has “died” many times, only to come back stronger, and AI followed almost the same arc. Lessons learned, not obituaries.

What survives and why

Pesce traces the lineage from Ivan Sutherland’s clunky “Sword of Damocles” headset to NASA’s VIEW and the artful OSMOSE, then to Google Cardboard’s sudden democratization. The throughline: immersion matters when the experience demands it, but the hardware must stop making people sick. He suggests augmented reality — which keeps you grounded in the real world — may be the pragmatic path forward, even if current pass-through systems like Apple Vision Pro and Samsung XR still feel odd and tiring for most people. He also warns, compellingly, that continuous environment mapping makes AR a surveillance device — a privacy trade-off that can’t be waved away.

Pesce’s bigger point is about inevitability. Technologies that “die” often just pause while the hardware and experiences catch up. Sound familiar? AI went through winters, raised eyebrows, then reemerged to reshape industries. VR’s repeated resurrections look eerily similar. The secret sauce, he says, will be a matchup: lighter, less nausea-inducing hardware plus killer content that justifies the fuss.

So, is the metaverse dead? Pesce’s answer is a firm no — at least not yet. If history is any guide, the scene will keep evolving until the right combination lands. Will it feel like Stephenson’s fiction? Maybe. Will it be wrapped in surveillance and privacy fights? Almost certainly. Buckle up — or don’t. The tech keeps coming back.

Sources: The Register