It isnt really that close. People keep hyping it and the term Metaverse is a buzzword. The reality is there is a lot of infrastructure needed, some of which is going to take a couple decades to build. For example, our communication systems needs make speed upgrades to ensure latency to make the virtual worlds seems real. This will likely only happen after edge computing is to the point where advanced AI services can operate there.

This will take a long time until we get to anything that even resembles Ready Player One which is only a portion of the Metaverse.