It's flattering, yet ironic. Everyone is talking about the Metaverse now: Microsoft are adding avatars in Teams, Facebook is renamed Meta, everyone makes avatars... Yet, we have been building the Metaverse for many years, and what we did years ago was so ahead of its time: for reference, this article is an eye-opener, it put things in perspective.... https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/10/30/playstation-home-in-2009-looks-better-than-meta-facebooks-horizon-worlds-in-2021/?fbclid=IwAR0Whp6cY7FcG6ySxkQJFFVFf8HV83QvGvc3zVoz3U5pcB_LqycYXyZ8d4k&sh=1162d571d98f
PlayStation Home started in 2007! And see the screenshot below: that was Atom Republic's first release, 9 years ago! What we did in PlayStation Home did look a lot higher fidelity than most of today's attempts at the Metaverse, at least in terms of photo-realism.
Find here a 2012 blog post from PlayStation, showing the variety and the quality of what was proposed at the time on the platform: https://blog.playstation.com/2012/12/17/ataris-40th-birthday-winter-holidays/comment-page-2/
As an artist, I fell in love with virtual worlds when I saw PlayStation Home, it inspired me to create Atom Republic, to be a developer for PlayStation Home.Then in 2014, I created Atom Universe to become the most realistic virtual world ever made!
Striving for photo realism, I tried to make Atom Universe the most beautiful Metaverse experience possible; this is a screenshot of what Atom Universe looked like back in 2015 on PlayStation 4: yes, this was over 6 years ago. This image below is a real in-game screenshot, not a mock-up: