The Metaverse and TV

What is the Metaverse? The short answer: "It's the Internet, except you can walk around in it." The long answer: "An Internet-like system, except using a three-dimensional world metaphor with which you interact using a three-dimensional virtual representation of yourself (see Digital Avatar) instead of a two-dimensional hyperlinked-document metaphor with which you interact by clicking links and buttons." The trope answer: The Internet becoming Cyberspace for real and everyone knowing about it and interacting with it that way. The advent of Second Life and its open-source equivalent, Open Sim, may make this future arrive sooner than you think. Some might argue that it already has, what with real-world governments and businesses setting up shop in Second Life, people making real-world money entirely within Second Life, and successful experiments at teleporting avatars between the Second Life grid and various OpenSim grids. However, with the drastic dulling of the use of these services, the concept fell by the wayside for years... until projects like Oculus Rift and Janus VR started bringing it back. This is a subtrope of Cyberspace where it's widely known and used as a replacement for today's Internet by the public at large, not just by a few lucky hackers, discoverers, or inventors' friends. Not to be confused with the Metaverse Web fiction.