DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan 18 (Reuters) – The author who first envisioned the metaverse 30 years ago sat down on Wednesday with a top executive from the company that invested billions in building it and agreed that there were formidable obstacles to bring it to the masses.

Neal Stephenson, who coined the term in his 1992 novel “Snowcrash,” and Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, presented a series of engineering breakthroughs needed to enable millions of people to move seamlessly through immersive virtual worlds. that are displayed on the head. mounted devices.

“We’re in a very early version, the Xerox PARC era,” Cox said on a World Economic Forum panel, referring to the company that developed the mouse and other critical computing technologies 50 years ago.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” Stephenson said,…