Screw Metaverse. Let's make a VR holodeck.

Star Trek's Holodeck is actually a good case study here (especially with the recent series, Lower Decks, going as far as making two episodes that are interactive movies on a holodeck, going quite deep into how that could work in practice both in terms of producing and experiencing them).

One observation derived here is that infinite procedural content at your fingertip doesn't necessarily kill all meaning, if you bring the meaning with you. The two major use cases[0] for the holodeck are:

- Multiplayer scenarios in which you and your friends enjoy some experience in a program. The meaning is sourced from your friendship and roleplay; the program may be arbitrary output of an RNG in the global sense, but it's the same for you and your friends, so shared experience (and its importance as a social object) in your group is retained.

- Single-player simulations that are highly specific. The meaning here comes from whatever is the reason you're simulating that particular experience, and it's connection to the real world. Like idk., a flight simulator of a random space fighter flying over random world shooting at random shit would quickly get boring, but if I can get the simulator to give me a highly accurate cockpit of an F/A-18 Hornet, flying over real terrain and shooting at realistic enemies in realistic (even if fictional) storyline - now that would be deeply meaningful to me, because 1) F/A-18 Hornet is a real plane that I would otherwise never experience flying, and 2) I have a crush on this particular fighter because F/A-18 Hornet 3.0 is one of the first videogames I ever played in my life as a kid.

Now, to make Metaverse less like bullshit and more like Star Trek, we'd need to make sure the world generation is actually available to the users. No asset stores, no app marketplace bullshit. We live in a multimodal LLM era - we already have all the components to do it like Star Trek did it: "Computer, create a medieval fantasy village, in style of England around year 1400, set next to a forest, with tall mountains visible in the distance", then walk around that world and tweak the defaults from there.

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[0] - Ignoring the third use case that's occasionally implied on the show, and that's really obvious given it's the same one the Internet is for - and I'm not talking about cat pictures.