Neither company is relying exclusively on its particular vision. Apple’s demo included standard VR tricks, transporting us lock, stock, and eyeball into crazy situations, like a tightrope walk between mountains. And Meta has its own vision of a digital office with multiple screens.

But Apple’s passion was clearly directed into redefining work and expanding popular apps, like a mindfulness tool that relaxes your breathing and, presumably, your soul. Instead of calming your inner being with a soothing image on a flat screen, Apple delivered a full-body embrace in the form of flower-petal-like shapes oozing toward you and ultimately surrounding you in a blast of om-itude. And Apple’s workplace simulation dazzled with graphic fidelity and an endless flow of display screens controlled by ridiculously intuitive finger motions. Meanwhile, its social aspect was relatively lackluster, relying on uncanny-valley-ish Facetime representations of your friends and colleagues. Conversely, Meta’s workplace ambitions seem stalled—future versions of the $1,500 Quest Pro, the higher-end headset that ran its (somewhat uninspiring) productivity software—have apparently been scuttled.

It will be fascinating to see which of these worlds manages to pull us in. Or whether any of them do. Are we ready to leave reality—the one humans have experienced for tens of thousands of years—and jump into the metaverse, or swap our natural vision for a Vision Pro?

Your impulse might be to say No! I love the real world! There are trees there! But have you ever sat at a dinner table with teens, or venture capital bros? Instead of immersing themselves in the tastes and aromas of the meal or becoming absorbed in conversations, they stare at their phones, swiping endlessly. A reasonably priced device that sucks up even more attention might ratchet up whatever compels people to spend their time with gadgets. It might not happen soon, but tech giants—no dummies—are directing billions of dollars to removing any obstacles to that future. If they succeed, reality as we know it won’t stand a chance. And when we use the word presence, we will mean the opposite.

Neal Stephenson invented the metaverse. Or at least, he laid out the vision and named it. His novel Snow Crash was the first time that term was used, describing an alternative reality where Earth-bound wannabes can attain fame and glory in a computer-generated artificial universe. Not bad for 1992. I wrote about Stephenson in 1999 for Newsweek. And in 2023? Neal’s working on a metaverse startup.

When it comes to depicting the nerd mind-set, no one tops Stephenson. His predecessors in the cyberpunk science-fiction movement (writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling) depicted hackers as moody James Deans in leather. Stephenson lays out the way they really think and act—awkward, chatty mensches whose insistence on logic makes them borderline nut cases. That, and his sense of the techno-future—an imaginative vision blasting off from the launching pad of scientific truth and Silicon Valley buzz—has made him compulsory reading in the high-tech world, the hacker Hemingway. "Everybody reads Neal Stephenson here," says Mike Paull, a manager in Microsoft's hardware division. "He's our inspiration."