Abstract

JOURNAL OF INTERACTIVE ADVERTISING 2021, VOL. 21, NO. 3, 141–144 https://doi.org/10.1080/15252019.2021.2001273 FROM THE EDITOR Jooyoung Kim Department of Advertising and Public Relations, Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA Metaverse is a term that has been gaining traction in the one can clearly foretell what the metaverse, considered as tech world since 2020. The term metaverse, a three- Web 3.0 (Cook et al. 2020), will be like in the future. dimensional virtual world inhabited by avatars of real But it is believed to be true that the metaverse is very people—and coined by Neal Stephenson in his novel near or is already here (in its primitive form) to stay Snow Crash (1992)—became one of the hottest tech with us and evolve in ways we may not be able to terms in 2021. In fact, a Google Trends search shows the see now. Many leading tech firms are jumping on the meta- term has been actively searched since early 2021, starting around the time when Roblox went public on March 10, verse trend. Nvidia Omniverse, Facebook Horizon, then when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in April that Microsoft’s enterprise metaverse, to name a few,