Notable that the people I've read talking about this so far (top down, influential people) talk about what is essentially an architecture based approach and not a product based one.

Anything that succeeds is going to be the expression of desire, and anything that is not the expression of desire is necessarily imposed on people and requires an increasing proportion of its resources to sustain it against the people it is imposed on. This is why I think architecture and other artifacts of technocratic thinking are interesting, but diseconomic and dumb. Nobody will invent a metaverse where they do not rule or control it, just like nobody believes anything political that doesn't justify their own sense of protagonism.

When someone says, "let's build a metaverse!" I am glad that they are distracted by own hubris, which costs them some months or years against leveraging their resources and conceits into doing any more harm. The way to see the future is not to invent it, but to listen to what people want, choose the ones you want to help, and help them to prevail.

It's so much easier to invent internally consistent frameworks, models, and architectures than it is to make even the simplest useful tool. Want a metaverse? Write me a program that provides me security, and I'm not the dumb one for leaving that meaning unspecified, you're the dumb one for not being able to figure it out.

The genius of the other metaverse (social media) is that it is a set of programs for providing another basic human desire: approval. If someone said, "write me a program that gives me personal validation and approval," almost nobody would invent facebook, but a few did, and the winner took all. Another basic need, sex, is also mostly integrated, I don't know what new form of transaction that is going to change that as much as online dating, porn, and the ongoing normalizaiton of sex work just did, as any change there seems marginal in comparison. Going up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, from physiological to self-actualization, we've got products that provide access to most of them, where Twitter is working on "esteem," where everyone imagines themselves as a kind of political micro-warlord with their followers. These weren't the artifacts of frameworks, they are responses to desire.

Personally, I think the bargain of a metaverse is you can have simulated everything, so long as you give up self actualization and dignity. We will accumulate comforting symbols to distract and obscure the nagging shame of it, and to forget if only briefly that we forfeited our agency to a system controlled by others, and with it, any connection to something universal or divine. We'll even moralize it, saying there was never anything there but superstition, the self justifying fairy tales that people with less approval and stuff tell themselves, or perhaps artifacts of illigitimacy based on an injustice that is finally righted now that we are all subjects of the same system, with the only rules being the ones that sustain and preserve its order. In this sense, everything about the metaverse idea is a way for its inventors to break from being subject to the real, and reign over what appears to be a kind of hell for everyone else.