Metaverse? Welcome to 'Icelandverse'!

Chatterbox Moo wrote a column · Nov 12, 2021 10:15

A video published yesterday by Inspired by Iceland, a marketing campaign for Icelandic tourism, takes aim at a Mark Zuckerberg video released in October announcing Facebook's name change to Meta. In it, Zuckerberg hypes the so-called "metaverse," a virtual world that "will be the successor to the mobile internet."

If the goal was to get people talking about Iceland, a new tourism video is more than succeeding.

The metaverse's defining quality, said Zuckerberg, is "the feeling of presence … like you're there with other people."

The video extolls Iceland's "completely immersive" experiences, such as its real rocks, real humans and "skies you can see with your eyeballs."

Reactions to the video were overwhelmingly positive, with people praising the "Olympic-level trolling" by Iceland officials, and many expressing a desire to visit.