Philosophy & Technology (2022) 35:73

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00568-6

EDITOR LETTER

Metaverse: a Matter of Experience

Luciano Floridi1,2

Accepted: 15 July 2022

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022

1 Introduction

There is a lot of talk about the Metaverse these days. It happens if Mark Zuckerberg,
one of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world, decides to bet eve-
rything on this technology. But it also happens because the digital business world
is looking for new sources of profits. According to some research, such as that of
ReportLink,1 the Metaverse market could be worth 758.6 billion dollars in 2026. JP
Morgan,2 Forbes,3 and GrayScale Research4 round up and talk about a trillion dol-
lars, in a somewhat indeterminate future. The consequence is that the investments
are significant and influential, the reasoning being “if these companies invest so
much surely [add here your preferred conclusion]”. They are made by companies
like Microsoft (70 billion dollars), Meta (the old Facebook, 10 billion dollars), or
Google (“only” 39.5 million dollars).5 It is a lot of money, but to have a couple of
metrics, it is better to remember that, in 2022, Elon Musk offered 44 billion dollars
just for Twitter,6 and the Biden administration secured a budget of 44.9 billion dol-
lars to fight climate change.7 It seems that we care much more about virtual reality
than the real one. Sooner or later, Mother Nature will give us a painful slap. But
let us go back to the Metaverse. There is a lot of talk about it also because it is a

1
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/02/22/2389001/0/en/Global-Metaverse-Market-to-
Reach-US-758-6-Billion-by-the-Year-2026.html
2
https://www.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm/treasury-services/documents/opportunities-in-the-metav
erse.pdf
3
https:// www. forbes. com/ sites/ great specu latio ns/ 2021/ 12/ 20/ the- metaverse- is-a- 1- trill ion- reven ue-
opportunity-heres-how-to-invest/
4
https://grayscale.com/learn/the-metaverse/
5
https://www.makeuseof.com/companies-investing-in-metaverse/
6
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61222470
7
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2022/03/28/president-bidens-fy-2023-budget-reduces-
energy-costs-combats-the-climate-crisis-and-advances-environmental-justice/#:~:text=The%20Presiden
t’s%20Budget%20invests%20a,increase%20of%20nearly%2060%20percent.

* Luciano Floridi
luciano.floridi@oii.ox.ac.uk
1
Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK
2
Department of Legal Studies, University of Bologna, Via Zamboni, 27, 40126 Bologna, Italy

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 73 Page 2 of 7 L. Floridi

new frontier where there are no rules. Instead, regulations have arrived for data and
artificial intelligence, at least in the European Union, although there is no lack of
legal initiatives, similar to the GDPR and AI Act, in the USA and elsewhere. When
the legislative cat appears to have finally caught the innovation mouse by the tail,
the mouse runs away, and the cat must resume the chase. And finally, there is a lot
of talk about the Metaverse, not only because it is the typical news that makes the
news, but also because it is an old dream. It is, in fact, a network of virtual worlds,
in which to immerse ourselves to enjoy a variety of experiences without leaving our
seats. A desirable reality, which adapts to us, to our wishes and commands, and not
vice versa. How could we not find it fascinating? But what is the Metaverse exactly?
And what fundamental issues underlie its development?

2 Expanded Reality (XR) and eXpanded Experience (XE)

It is known that the term “Metaverse” has been around for decades. The neologism
was coined in 1992 by Neal Stephenson, in his cyberpunk science fiction book Snow
Crash (Stephenson, 1992). He used it to describe an Internet-based virtual world,
in which users can build digital realities and share experiences through their ava-
tars. All this can be easily found on Wikipedia. What is worth pointing out are two
aspects of the Metaverse that can be confusing.
First of all, the Metaverse has at least two meanings, a bit like the term “Web”.
We can speak of it as a new platform, understood as that digital space where the
experience is virtual, three-dimensional, immersive, and with (limited) kinetic and
tactile possibilities. But it can also be spoken of as a specific metaverse (note the
lowercase m) different from another: imagine the metaverse of a fashion house and
the metaverse of an FPS (First-Person Shooter) game. In short, just as there is the
Web and there are websites, there is the Metaverse and the “metaverse sites”. Any-
one trying to build the Metaverse probably refers to the ambition of providing the
interface to the Metaverse and its metaverses. A bit like building the browser to
access the Web.
The second aspect that can be confusing is that the Metaverse is becoming a sort
of “catch-all” term to talk about Web 3.0, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs (Free-
man et al., 2022), DeFi (Decentralised Finance), DAO (Decentralised Autonomous
Organization), and so on. This is because, in its most general sense, the Metaverse
is seen as the next step in the development of digital technology, after the web and
mobile telephony. In short, it would be the great container where all the other digital
innovations would find the most productive environment to thrive. And as if that
weren’t enough, depending on who speaks, the Metaverse would be part of Web 3.0
or vice versa.
All this generates confusion. So, to understand what the Metaverse is, it is better
to pay attention and be more precise. First of all, we should limit ourselves to talking
about the Metaverse, not about specific metaverses, and then about the Metaverse
only as that virtual 3D space which can be accessed through specific dedicated hard-
ware (“the worldwide market for augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR)
headsets grew 92.1% year over year in 2021 with shipments reaching 11.2 million

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Metaverse: a Matter of Experience Page 3 of 7 73

units”8). From this point of view, the critical question becomes what kind of experi-
ence we are talking about when we speak of the Metaverse. Other aspects, from the
technical ones (think about the importance of 5G) to the economic and legal ones
(for example, what the business models will be, who pays for what, or who really
owns something), depend on the experience one can have in this entirely digital
space. And since what I am about to say applies not only to the Metaverse, but to all
kinds of virtual (which is entirely digital), augmented (where digital and analogue
realities overlap), or mixed (where digital and analogue objects coexist) realities,
and given that all these realities are collectively labelled extended reality or XR,
then looking at the questions posed by the Metaverse from the right point of view
means adopting an extended experience, that is eXperience or simply XE, as a yard-
stick. In other words, to evaluate the Metaverse, it is helpful to approach it in terms
of the XE of those who populate it and use it, to understand the challenges, risks,
opportunities, and possible future success or failure of this new technology.

3 Challenges

Among the main challenges for XE in the Metaverse are realism, interoperability, and
sharing. Anyone who has used Second Life, a sort of metaverse before the metaverse,
knows that the graphics and immersion were decidedly poor. The experience was any-
thing but “extended”, and it took patience and imagination to feel “immersed”. Today,
the realism of the Metaverse has made great strides, but there is still a lot to do. Above
all, it will remain a considerable limitation. At school, we learn that we have five
senses. Actually, our body has many more sensors: think, for example, of the sense of
balance, linked to the vestibular system, which is part of the inner ear of vertebrates
like us. It works in correlation to gravity, which is why one of the problems of XE, VR
sickness, is that the vestibule interacts badly with virtual reality, often causing a sick-
ness effect, which resembles car or sea sickness (after an hour inside Meta’s metaverse
I too had a bit of nausea, and I never suffer from any car sickness). But even if we limit
ourselves to considering only the five senses, the Metaverse is a bidimensional experi-
ence: it is visual and acoustic, for the interactive experience is mediated and not tactile
(think of the weight of things when we really lift them). In the Metaverse, there are
no flavours, fragrances, or skin experiences (cold or hot, soft, moist, abrasive, smooth
surfaces, etc.). For example, it is true that in 2014, Facebook bought Scentsitive for $
3.6 billion,9 a company that produced a “smell printer”, albeit quite limited in the vari-
ety of smells (in its time, they printed Zuckerberg’s favourite one, the smell of aged
gouda cheese, which is close to that of an old pair of socks). But it is implausible that
each of us could have such a printer at home which, every time we view a coffee in
the Metaverse, also makes us experience the aroma. The XR is “extended” only com-
pared to the very impoverished experience we commonly have when using a screen
and a keyboard or a mobile phone, not when it is compared to the analogue one, which

8
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS48969722
9
https://techexpectations.org/2014/04/01/facebook-pays-3-6-billion-for-digital-scent-technology/

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 73 Page 4 of 7 L. Floridi

is infinitely richer (for the geometrically minded reader, infinitely here is used in the
sense in which there are infinite points in a segment, the analogue is continuous like
the real numbers, and the digital is discrete as the integers). Therefore, in terms of real-
ism, the “real” reality, the analogue one, wins over the virtual 5 senses to 2.
Consider next the challenge of operating in the Metaverse as if it were a single
space. In our everyday, analogue reality, if you have a pen, you can take it with
you anywhere, to write on any piece of paper, say at home, in the classroom, or the
office. In the Metaverse, this is not true. Spaces are not interoperable, and if you
buy a virtual pen to use in the metaverse of a school, you will not be able to use it
to keep track of how many zombies you have killed in the metaverse of a game. It is
not just a technical problem. There are open standards like OpenXR, which aims to
standardize hardware operation to “solve AR/VR fragmentation”).10 It is probably
above all an economic one, because companies tend to close their metaverses to cap-
ture users and keep them in their spaces. In the future, there will likely be as many
different XEs as there are metaverses that platforms will make available, a bit like
many years ago, when we used to talk of Windows users and Mac users. A plausible
scenario is that the Metaverse will provide different interfaces to independent and
unrelated metaverses, comparable to the world of platforms for video games or for
stream, incompatible between them and within them, leading to incompatible games
themselves. The future is likely to see the emergence of a handful of local monopo-
lies (think of Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Disney Plus, Netflix, etc.).
Finally, there is sharing. This challenge is the most approachable. Already today,
the Metaverse makes it easy to go to the cinema together. Almost eleven million
people participated in two virtual concerts organized by Fortnite in 2020 and 2021
(remember that they were also years of lockdown for COVID). However, conceptu-
ally, it will be interesting to see how we adapt, because, in real life, socialization is
often an imposed fact, and only sometimes a choice, while the default position in
the Metaverse is loneliness, with socialization is a choice. At the time of writing, for
example, Oculus does not make it easy to meet other people, unless there are virtual
experiences to share. It is the difference between taking the bus and sharing it inevi-
tably with many other travellers and organizing a meeting with a friend for a pizza.
This is reminiscent of another great transformation, from a culture of recording
(what to record to leave for memory) to a culture of erasing (digital records everything,
the question is what to erase, like photographs on mobile phones). In the Metaverse,
we pass from social beings who have to choose what to record and when to be alone,
to individuals who have to decide what to delete and when to be in company.

4 Risks

We come to the risks. In this case too, it is important and valuable, but not very
interesting, to point out that, in an immersive virtual environment like the Metaverse,
the risks associated with digital technologies will be exacerbated; think of privacy,

10
https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/03/open-xr-0.90-ar-vr-standard

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Metaverse: a Matter of Experience Page 5 of 7 73

abuse such as bullying or virtual violence, computer crimes, cyber attacks, vandal-
ism and hacker attacks, or how ransomware and pornography might develop. All
this is nothing new. For instance, the first famous case of cyber “rape” dates back
to 1993, the year after the publication of Snow Crash, in what is one of the first vir-
tual worlds, a text-only MUD (a multiplayer real-time virtual world) called Lamb-
daMOO. On the 26th of May 2022, the BBC reported a case of sexual assault in the
Metaverse (specifically the Meta VR).11 It was just a matter of time. And any reader
“sceptical” that this sort of violence may feel deeply real should consider their expe-
rience if they were abused by a mere telephone call. Personally, I know it can feel
way too real. Still in 1993, after the cyber-rape case was reported, I made the experi-
ment of joining one of the MUD described above, impersonating a female teenager
and the experience, although only alphanumeric, was unpleasant enough never to try
that again.
These are all issues that should be addressed immediately, now that the Metaverse
is still under development and can be better designed. But taking the XE’s point of
view, it may be worth focusing also on less apparent risks. In this case too, I shall
briefly look at only the three that seem most pressing.
First of all, one may have too much XE. The problems of addiction and escape
from reality generated by the Metaverse could make a significant negative qualita-
tive leap. Just look at what is already happening in the context of gaming disor-
der and Internet addiction disorder. At the same time, one may have too little XE.
Think of all the opportunities, in contexts such as education, training, work, health,
or entertainment, that could be lost due to a lack of investment, upskilling, ethi-
cal and regulatory frameworks,12 social backlash, or simple inaction. Finally, one
may have the wrong XE. Not only ethically or legally, as we have seen above, but
also in the sense of incorrectly conceived or designed. This aspect should not be
underestimated. We have seen that analogue reality trumps virtual reality, but only
if it plays at home. Not metaphorically, the risk that the Metaverse runs is that of
mimicking analogue reality, reproducing cinemas, stadiums, shops, gyms, school
classes, streets and restaurants, squares and bars, and so on. Your philosopher was
deeply disappointed when the Meta app that enables you to watch Netflix is just
a way of going into a virtual room and… watch Netflix on a virtual screen. This
can be done at home infinitely more comfortably (real popcorn anyone?), with an
unbeatable quality (anyone willing to spend money on Oculus will probably have
an excellent TV screen already). And the fact that one may watch the same VR Net-
flix with a friend elsewhere does not justify the whole business. The point is that
the XE should be different from everyday experience. It should make us perceive
what is impossible to see and hear in everyday life. In a concert, I should be able
to participate as one of the artists. I should be able to understand what it means to
be in another person’s shoes. I would not like to walk but to be able to jump like a
kangaroo. See the world through the eyes of a cat. Move in space like a bat. Listen
to the colours play, and see the sounds take on colour, in synesthesia. Study a map

11
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61573661
12
For an early discussion of the ethics of cloud computing, see de Bruin and Floridi (2017).

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 73 Page 6 of 7 L. Floridi

as if I were a river. Dig a tunnel like an ant or go through the human body like a red
blood cell. One of my most exciting XE in the Metaverse so far has been a fantastic
“walk” outside the International Space Station. Unfortunately, much of the design of
the Metaverse takes inspiration (also for reuse reasons) from the creation of video
games, where imagination seems to be exercised more on the context (you find your-
self surrounded by zombies) than on the type of possible experience (you kill them
with the usual chainsaw).

5 Opportunities

Let me close with a note on the opportunities. There are many, but even in this case,
they can be grouped under three headings, because each technology we develop can
do, to varying degrees, three things for us (not mutually incompatible and sometimes
complementary). It enables us to stop doing what we do not like or do not feel like
doing (think of the dishwasher); to do better what we already do (whether we like it,
think of the smartphone, or not, think of the vacuum cleaner); and to do for the first
time what we otherwise would not have been able to do (think of the refrigerator).
The Metaverse, being a very flexible digital platform, can do all three of these things.
For example, we might avoid dangerous jobs or tasks, perhaps by remotely control-
ling a robot, or having to commute when the same task can be performed in virtual
reality. We could see whether the table fits our kitchen or whether the apartment we
want to rent on Airbnb is suitable. We could be in good company, more and bet-
ter, with distant people, sharing more experiences with them. In the Metaverse, we
could learn and have fun as we never could, asking Einstein for an explanation, dis-
cussing with Aristotle, or participating as actors in a film in complete virtual immer-
sion. We could treat patients in radically innovative ways, as we know it is already
possible for people suffering from agoraphobia (Freeman et al., 2022) (between 1
and 2% of the adult population).13 In the near future, the Metaverse could keep us
in touch with those we have lost, because deepfakes technology already exists, and
our digital remains may be sufficient to recreate avatars of ourselves even after we
are dead (Öhman & Floridi, 2017, 2018). “Live Forever” mode in the Metaverse is
planned by Somnium Space, for example.14 And, of course, the Metaverse could be
a fantastic platform for artistic creativity and innovation.

6 Conclusion

As always, even for the Metaverse, dealing with challenges, risks, and opportunities
will be an entirely human question of good or bad (or too often frustratingly absent)
preferences, choices, and decisions. And this note on the responsibility of designing

13
See also https://gamechangevr.com/
14
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp47y/metaverse-company-to-offer-immortality-through-live-forev
er-mode

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Metaverse: a Matter of Experience Page 7 of 7 73

a technology that lives up to our expectations and values allows me to close with
a final comment. I do not think that the Metaverse will develop as big companies
present it to us these days. You only need to read what Nick Clegg (President of
Global Affairs at Meta) writes about the Metaverse to know there is a lot of hype.15
When companies use the “10-year in the future” timeline, what they actually mean
is “we have no idea, maybe one day”. It seems that there is a lot of science fiction,
little technology, and even less understanding of human nature (remember the 5–2
game I was talking about). If it develops, I imagine it will be vertical and bounded
by sectors and apps, such as gaming, entertainment, health, education and training,
and art. I think it will probably be an archipelago of non-communicating metaverses
with very different functionalities, goals, degrees of usability, and costs. But above
all, I fear that the digital divide will increase rather than decrease, between those
who have adequate access to this new human experience or XE, and those who will
be excluded from it. At least on this last point, we should hope it will not happen,
but above all, we should think about it in time, to make the most of this technology
and avoid the worst.16

References
de Bruin, B., & Floridi, L. (2017). The ethics of cloud computing. Science and Engineering Ethics, 23(1),
21–39.
Freeman, D., Lambe, S., Kabir, T., Petit, A., Rosebrock, L., Ly-Mee, Yu., Dudley, R., Chapman, K., Mor-
rison, A., & O’Regan, E. (2022). Automated virtual reality therapy to treat agoraphobic avoidance
and distress in patients with psychosis (gameChange): A multicentre, parallel-group, single-blind,
randomised, controlled trial in England with mediation and moderation analyses. The Lancet Psy-
chiatry, 9(5), 375–388.
Öhman, C., & Floridi, L. (2017). The political economy of death in the age of information: A critical
approach to the digital afterlife industry. Minds and Machines, 27(4), 639–662.
Öhman, C., & Floridi, L. (2018). An ethical framework for the digital afterlife industry. Nature Human
Behaviour, 2(5), 318–320. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0335-2
Stephenson, N. (1992). Snow crash. Bantam Books.

Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

15
https://nickclegg.medium.com/making-the-metaverse-what-it-is-how-it-will-be-built-and-why-it-matte
rs-3710f7570b04
16
Many thanks to Emmie Hine, Claudio Novelli, and Mariarosaria Taddeo for their invaluable com-
ments on a previous version of the article.

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