The term “metaverse” originated in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, as a portmanteau of “meta” and “universe”. The term metaverse was coined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where humans, as programmable avatars, interact with each other and software agents, in a three-dimensional virtual space that uses the metaphor of the real world. Stephenson used the term to describe a virtual reality-based successor to the internet.