Let's Rename Everything "the Metaverse!"

In the mid-1980s, much of the military simulation being built in the United States went under the rubric “visual simulation.” When Jaron Lanier and VPL Research burst onto the scene with the term virtual reality (VR), suddenly people inside the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) began to realize that what they were doing seemed outdated—even timid—under the name visual simulation, and they desired to join Jaron and his crew in using the term “virtual reality.” But level heads inside the fivesided headquarters decided that it sounded too druggy. They decided to create a real sleeper of a marketing term, “synthetic environments,” with some maybe more-hip DOD workers renaming all that they did as virtual environments—a term that seemed halfway better and more appropriate than synthetic. Not long after that, all of the DOD employees in the modeling and simulation realm moved toward this better phrasing.