Remember when we were all going to ditch our humdrum lives, tedious physical needs and uninspiring friends and family, so that we could live a life of virtual bliss in the metaverse? When we could give up the endless pursuit of self-improvement and just exist as perfect avatars instead? When Facebook rebranded to Meta because, from now on, the company was going to be “metaverse-first, not Facebook-first”?It has been just one year since Meta’s fabulously dystopian Super Bowl advert for its VR headsets, in which a group of friends who have lost touch get back together in the virtual world (in the real one they were all alone, with no buddies).

Yet since that ad, excitement over the idea has withered. Type “metaverse” into Google Trends and you’ll see search traffic for the word has collapsed by about 80 per cent over the past year or so. These days, if you want to raise a load of cash, you’d be better off name-dropping “generative AI” — artificial intelligence that can “generate” text, images or other data. Venture capital investment into that particular sector jumped 425 per cent between 2020 and 2022.

So unenthusiastic are Meta’s own investors about the idea that chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was recently forced to say that the metaverse is “not the majority of what we’re doing”. These days, he’s talking more about efficiency than the metaverse. For good reason, too: Reality Labs, the division that makes the Meta Quest headsets, made an operating loss of $13.7bn last year.