Picture this: you’re getting ready to meet someone for a first date — psyching yourself up, maybe drinking coffee later in the day than most doctors would recommend. But tonight, you aren’t thinking about your wardrobe at all. In fact, you might even keep wearing the hoodie and sweatpants that you’ve been wearing since you popped out of bed that morning.
Why? Because you’re not going to meet this attractive stranger in a swanky bar, where such attire would almost certainly hurt your romantic prospects. At least, you’re not going to meet them in a physical bar. Instead, you’ll be heading to a virtual bar, where hopefully some very real sparks will fly. Or maybe the two of you will stroll through a mythical (and entirely digital) forest landscape. In the metaverse, anything is possible.
This sounds like science fiction (which, in fact, it literally is: the “metaverse,” both as a term and a concept, was coined by author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash), but this brave new world of dating may be just around the corner.
Webb Taylor Wright
B2 The Business of Business
December 10th, 2021
