Bending reality

Will you really be you in the metaverse?

- ANJULY MATHAI

Reality can be a real bummer. You have a hundred different problems to deal with in life, many of them simultaneously—from looming deadlines and societal expectations to cranky bosses and crankier exes. There is only one band-aid that can stem the flow of your disillusionment—escapism. For millennia, humans have been finding ways to escape reality, through books, movies, video games, virtual reality and now, through the metaverse. “People come to the Oasis because of all the things they can do. But they stay because of all the things they can be. They can be tall, beautiful, live-action, cartoon….,” says the protagonist, Wade, in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018), about a dystopian world where people live inside a virtual simulation called the Oasis (much like what the metaverse could look like in future). “Best of all, in the Oasis, no one could tell that I was fat, that I had acne, or that I wore the same shabby clothes every week, bullies could not pelt me with spitballs, give me atomic wedgies, or pummel me by the bike rack after school. No one could even touch me. In here, I was safe.”

Before you dismiss the Oasis as just a piece of sci-fi fabricated from someone’s hyperactive imagination, think of all the inventions that have actually been inspired by sci-fi— from the pacemaker, believed to have taken off from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, to self-driving cars, which were first popularised by the