This June, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees about an ambitious new initiative. The future of the company would go far beyond its current project of building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to support them. Instead, he said, Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of scifi — a world known as the metaverse. The company’s divisions focused on products for communities, creators, commerce and virtual reality would increasingly work to realize this vision, he said in a remote address to employees. “What I think is most interesting is how these themes will come together into a bigger idea,” Zuckerberg said. “Our overarching goal across all of these initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life.”

  The metaverse has been a hot topic of conversation recently, with Facebook and Microsoft both staking claims. Author Neal Stephenson is credited with....