The metaverse has no single creator (or definition), so it is not something Facebook owns or is solely responsible for developing. Heyning, 45, has joined with some volunteers to form the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, which aims to establish technology standards for "linking virtual worlds, in the hope that players in the metaverse will adopt them". Since many massively multiplayer online games share features with the metaverse, but only provide access to non-persistent instances, which are shared by up to several dozen players, the concept of multiverse virtual games has been used to distinguish them from the metaverse. Stephenson's Metaverse appears to its users as an urban environment, developed along a single hundred-metre-wide road, the Street, which runs the entire 65536 km (216 km) circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet.
Roblox, a platform where independent developers create games popular with children, may be the closest and most expansive vision of the metaverse.
