Picture this: you enter a world as a customisable avatar, interact with people in the setting, travel from one place to another and make purchases, all from the comfort of your sofa. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s the premise for the novel and movie Ready, Player One written by Ernest Cline and Directed by Steven Spielberg. It is easy to dismiss a virtual world as mere Hollywood fiction, but this reality is much closer than you think. In October 2021, Facebook rebranded as Meta. This ushered in the next evolution of the internet as we know it. What is the Metaverse? The term ‘Metaverse’ can be traced back to Neal Stephenson’s 1992 dystopic, cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. In the novel, this ‘metaverse’ is a virtual 3D space that users can access remotely and interact with one another. In fairness, such online communities have existed since the advent of the internet – think IRC, MSN messenger, Friendster etc....