THE WORST IDEAS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

NOT ALL IDEAS CAN BE HITS. ALONGSIDE GROUND-BREAKING INNOVATIONS, 21ST-CENTURY SCIENTISTS HAVE HELMED THEIR SHARE OF WILD TECH FLOPS, DUBIOUS THEORIES AND OVERHYPED BREAKTHROUGHS. HERE ARE THE BIGGEST TO FORGET

- IAN TAYLOR

THE METAVERSE

If you don't know what the metaverse is (no judgment because it was horribly sold), it was a word that Mark Zuckerberg and roughly four other people used to describe loosely connected immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), open-world gaming, digital avatars and nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The internet 3.0, if you will.

Zuckerberg imagined a terribly animated dystopia where we could work and socialise on a hybrid plane of semi-digital existence. We would have avatars to attend meetings for us, but for some reason, they wouldn't have legs. You could buy a mansion made of pixels, not bricks. Pop-up notifications would bombard our retinas via AR glasses that superimposed online content over the real world. And thanks to VR, we could do anything or go anywhere simply by strapping a heavy, sweat-inducing computer to our faces.

Some of these technologies are still fighting for life, but many have faded from relevance or completely stalled.

Zuckerberg's VR branch has now lost a staggering $58bn (£46bn) since 2020. Don't expect those losses to be a blip - a survey of 624 tech experts found that nearly half believe the metaverse won't play a major role in our lives, even by 2040.

HYPERLOOP

From an engineering perspective, hyperloop is a bold, world-changing form of transport - if only someone could get it to work. The idea is to encase people and cargo in a steel tube, then propel them with magnets through a near-vacuum at 1,000km/h (about 600mph), hopefully without rearranging anyone's internal organs.