WHEN I was a wee guy, I dreamt endlessly about what living in the future would be like.

Would there be flying motors and hoverboards? Would we all live in amazing, gleaming houses made of glass that looked like something out of The Jetsons with a fleet robot helping us with any and every task?

Now I see that no, it’s not like that at all. It’s just Scotland playing Israel every other week, the whole planet being on fire and everything getting worse all the time.

But that all changed last week when Mark Zuckerberg announced his latest venture: The Metaverse.

A virtual reality space you access via a headset where you can mingle with people.

A digital universe where you travel anywhere and interact with anyone. Now we’re talking, I thought. This is the first time I’ve felt like I’m living in the future.

The future I’d read about in sci-fi and seen on Tomorrow’s World. But will it be everything Zuckerberg claims it will be?

After I watched the first videos of him introducing it and calmed down my initial excitement, I went back and watched them again.

I’m not one for slagging people’s appearances, however I’m about to make an exception here as he is a multi-billionaire who will never come across or indeed care about my opinion of him.

Mark Zuckerberg, and this has been said many times before, does not look human. In the announcement video, he stands in a CGI living room as if he is in his Metaverse.

He looks down the camera lens and you can see, if you focus on his eyes, that there’s nothing there. Not a single flicker of warmth, no glint of happiness.

They are a pair of eyes that would not look out of place on a goldfish. His mouth twitches when he pauses in between delivering his spiel.

Like he’s not quite gotten used to having a mouth yet, which is entirely possible given that he is clearly an alien masquerading as a man.

He gestures with his hands as if they aren’t his own.

It’s quite unnerving to watch. You may think I’m being quite cruel here, and you’d be right. To be honest I fear Mark Zuckerberg.

I hope to never be in his company as I know I will almost certainly try and unmask him like a Scooby-Doo villain which will lead to me being killed either by him in his true reptilian form or apprehended and battered by his army of security guys.

Later in the video he brings in some colleagues who act all pally with him to explain more about the Metaverse. They seem like hostages.

“Smile and be enthusiastic” I imagine a sniper saying to them from somewhere off screen.

The whole thing is very, very weird, which I suppose should be expected given that we’re talking about a new digital world lifted straight from the pages of a science fiction book.

Zuckerberg says that the Metaverse will be a fun and fully immersive place to spend time with your pals and family, play games, view 3D digital art and all sorts of other things.

I read a thing yesterday which said he was looking at a special glove, which could eventually become a whole bodysuit, which you wear along with the VR headset.

This skin will be able to replicate the sensation of touch so if you pick something up in the Metaverse, you’ll be able to actually feel it in real life through the miracle of technology.

Would be amazing to watch a game of football in there so I can experience getting hit in the back of the head by a balled-up Paradise Windfall ticket from the comfort of my own home.

I think it perhaps says a lot that one of the richest people alive is pouring his money into a virtual reality version of earth for us to escape into, where things will be utopian and amazing, when the real world is in the state it’s in.

Why spend your gargantuan fortune trying to improve reality when you can create a “better” digital alternative?

It makes the conspiracy theorist in me think that he knows something we don’t.

Will there be a point in the future where this technology becomes so advanced that we can’t tell the Metaverse apart from real life?

Will there be people who prefer their digital life and so just never unplug from it? Will it, like everything else, be a lot of hype that ultimately comes to nothing of note?

Who knows, but I know for sure that I’m hugely excited to try it as soon as I can.

I hope Zuckerberg digitally recreates Springboig so I can log in and look at my old house in 3D like I do with Google Maps for some reason.