🟣 SC
Why the term Metaverse took hold, specifically, is an unknowable question. “Cyberspace” seems to have been left behind — probably because it was too commonly used to skeuomorphically describe where online “things” “resided” in the 1990s — while the “Matrix” was likely impaired by the blockbuster success of the film of the same name. Maybe the “Grid” was too similar to other already-popular terms such as the “power grid.” Virtual reality never really went away, which is problem number one, but it was also too firmly associated with hardware, problem two, and those products were typically considered flops and “uncool.” Three strikes. VR-adjacent terms, such as AR, the newer MR, and newest XR, brought their own taxonomy problems and, in an inversion of VR’s problem, lacked products that would have given consumers an intuitive understanding of one versus another.
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