A second life: Welcome to the metaverse, the next frontier in filmmaking

What if you could live two lives at once? 

That's the premise of Ben Stiller's Apple thriller series Severance. Employees of a mysterious tech corporation undergo brain operations in which a chip is inserted and divides their work memories from their personal memories. 

Once they enter the elevator of their workplace, they become the "work" version of themselves, with no memory of who they are or what they're like in their personal lives. 

The show offers one interpretation of the "metaverse," a somewhat-hypothetical digital universe that parallels our everyday lives. Filmmakers and entertainment companies alike have recognized its potential as a narrative trope — and as a filmmaking tool. Facebook is also dipping a toe in with a newly renamed parent company, Meta.

In 1992, writer Neal Stephenson coined the term "metaverse" in his science fiction novel Snow Crash. Stephenson's vision was that of a sweeping virtual world existing in tandem with real life.

Since then, the concept and its definition have swelled, though most go back to Stephenson's idea as a framework. 

"It's a vast virtual world, which can be interacted in by millions of users at the same time through avatars," said Wagner James Au, author of The Making of Second Life and founder of the longest-running metaverse culture blog, New World Notes.

Popular metaverse prototypes include virtual world-building platforms such as Second Life and VRChat, as well as gaming platforms Roblox and Fortnite. Roblox alone has 55 million daily active users.

"It's highly immersive, it has creation tools, so that virtually any experience can be created and it's connected to the real life economy, generally through a cash-out process," Au said. 

In a report by VICE, venture capitalist and angel investor Mathew Ball offers this perspective: If your phone is a computer in your pocket from which the internet is always accessible, then the metaverse should be thought of as always being within a computer and inside the internet.

A true metaverse — one accessible by a single gateway, in which life persists even in a user's absence — doesn't yet exist.

But its depiction on screen is becoming more frequent and all-encompassing, giving audiences an idea of what to expect from what experts call "the next stage of the internet."

Beyond Severance, the Amazon Prime black comedy Upload is set in a future where the deceased can pay a generous fee to live on in a metaverse-like afterlife created by a tech company. The characters choose which version of heaven they want to exist in, but it's not the utopia you'd expect.

And the 2021 film Free Guy stars Vancouver-born Ryan Reynolds as a bank teller who discovers that he lives in a metaverse-like game world, where others are at risk of being permanently deleted by the game's creator.