Watch: Philip Rosedale Interviews Metaverse Pioneer Avi Bar-Zeev on Helping Create Second Life Prims, Apple's VisionPro, and Much More

Philip Rosedale's latest vlogcast interview is with Avi Bar-Zeev, an XR/metaverse pioneer who's been doing this so long, he was working for a virtual world company in the 90s which Neal Stephenson used to visit shortly after Snow Crash came out — when Stephenson first reportedly looked into creating the Metaverse himself. (At least that's what Avi remembers; more on that below.)

Since then, Avi helped create Second Life's prim-based creation system (a topic he discusses with Philip here), and eventually went on to do experience design work for Apple's VisionPro. As he tells Philip:

"It's really good for a lot of certain applications but what Apple's throwing down the gauntlet with is saying this is the next user interface paradigm, and it's the one that's gonna displace the mouse and windows… It's not just about having more screen real estate. It's about having the content come off the screens. And so a lot of the toolkits they've shown make it easy for you to pop stuff out of 2d into 3d including personas." (Personas being what Apple calls "avatars").

In the interview Philip mentions an amazing user-creation demonstration of the power of prims — watch that below, plus an excerpt of my chat with Avi from Making a Metaverse That Matters:

Read about creating "Watch the World" here

The Metaverse was never simply just a fictional conceit for a cyberpunk novel.

In fact, based on one expert’s account, the first steps to actually build the Metaverse were taken by Neal Stephenson himself.

That’s according to Avi Bar-Zeev, whose own footprint in metaverse-related technology is impressive in its own right. Currently a senior experience prototyper at Apple, Bar-Zeev helped develop Second Life in its early days, co-founded the mirror world project eventually dubbed Google Earth, and co-invented Microsoft's Hololens mixed reality device. But his first job out of college was at Worldesign, a very early virtual world company based in Seattle, launched in the early 90s during the first flush of media and business excitement over VR.

Shortly after Snow Crash was published, Avi tells me that Stephenson, a Seattle resident himself, would often hang out in the Worldesign office, located above an antique furniture store in the Ballard neighborhood.

At some point, as Avi recalls, Neal Stephenson’s visits took on a very specific end goal:

“Neal came by with his business lawyer and was really interested in, ‘Could we build the Metaverse now? How much of the Snow Crash Metaverse could we actually build on present 1994 computers?’ [Stephenson] wanted to know if it was feasible to build the Metaverse for consumers.”

The Worldesign team, which was showing off VR demos it had made to companies like Disney, had a sober answer to that question. As Bar-Zeev puts it now:

“We told him it's probably not going to fly in 1992 or 1993: ‘You're going to have to wait awhile.’” The computing requirements at the time were simply not feasible. “We were using $100,000 computers to do decent VR.”

Again, this query didn’t seem to stem from research for a new novel. In Bar-Zeev’s telling, it reflected plans by Neal Stephenson to build something like the virtual world he had just written about.

“We met with him and his lawyer, so I think it was serious.”