Tim Cook was the latest CEO of a major tech company to challenge metaversion. A concept that Mark Zuckerberg relied on to launch his ambitious strategic commitment (including changing Facebook’s name) while trying to abandon the social network’s excesses in terms of privacy.

Apple’s boss believes it most people couldn’t even define metaversions and you don’t even spend long periods in it, as Zuckerberg claims. Much less “ending the internet” as we know it to become the next great communication platform at scale.

Marc Zuckerberg wants to be the “King of the Metaverse” and he may succeed, but according to Cook, he can find enough. «I always think it’s important for people to understand what it is.”Cook explains to Dutch publication Bright, “Y I’m not really sure the average person can tell you what a metaversion is«.

Cook also expressed skepticism that people want to spend long periods of time in virtual worlds: “Virtual reality is something you can really immerse yourself in. And that can be used comfortably, but I don’t think you want to live like that for the rest of your life. VR is for set periods, but it’s not the best way to communicate.”.

Cook’s comments make him the latest high-profile CEO express skepticism about the metaversion. Snap’s CEO has already hinted that the company avoids using the term because it is “entirely ambiguous and hypothetical” and that if you asked a room of people to describe it, all their definitions would be “completely different”. Amazon’s head of devices explained the same: “If you were to ask a few hundred people what they think the metaverse is, you’d get 205 different answers.”.

The Metaverse thing is very green

Really there is no common definition from the term first used in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash. A sci-fi title that became the best-selling cyberpunk novel of the 1990s, which, in addition to many references to the genre, did not avoid mathematical and scientific concepts surrounding new technologies and included a mention of the term avatar as an image of a person on the Internet.

In the novel, the metaversion is a shared virtual space using virtual reality, augmented reality, avatars, and the Internet. The idea proposed by Zuckerberg follows this path, albeit with some differences and focus. It’s not the first time this has been attempted, and we’ve already seen it in Second Life, a social network launched in June 2003 as an open programming virtual world. After a big initial push, the use of Second Life was reduced to a minimum, but its concept certainly did not go unnoticed for the development of new virtual worlds that are claimed to be “revolutionary”.

It is not easy to know whether Tim Cook’s statements are intended ‘stop’ the impact of Meta or does he mean what he says, that the meta version won’t be so bad. They have already come from Intel to release the hype and suggest that to develop the virtual worlds described by Zuckerberg, we would have to multiply the current computing power by thousands.

We’ll have to wait. Apple has spent years investing huge amounts of money and talent into augmented reality technology (including the acquisition of PrimeSense, the company that developed the sensor technology for Microsoft’s Kinect), and it’s only a matter of time before it delivers its own hardware.

What do you think? Will metaversion be the big revolution that Zuckerberg promises? Or will it end up being the fiasco that virtual reality has been?