Epic’s Tim Sweeney: Be patient. The Metaverse will come. And it will be open.

I hear a lot of speeches. But Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games and a longtime graphics guru, stitched together the best vision I’ve heard in a while at last week’s VRX virtual reality conference in San Francisco. Sweeney talked about how to build the open Metaverse, the virtual world envisioned by Neal Stephenson in the novel Snow Crash in 1992. That novel’s vision of a pervasive cyberspace where we live, work, and play has inspired many a startup, from Second Life maker Linden Lab to Stephenson’s current employer, augmented reality glasses maker Magic Leap.

I wrote about Sweeney’s speech in last week’s DeanBeat. Many people have tried and failed to build the Metaverse, and I came across two new companies in the past week that are invoking the name in their own pitches. But Sweeney’s vision wrapped in everything from virtual economies and blockchain to platform control and Metaverse file formats. Sweeney predicted how realistic avatars such as the one Epic showed earlier this year will mesh with other technologies to enable us to build the ubiquitous cyberspace. And he also thought a lot about its ramifications.