[peterclary]

Some of this is people wanting to recreate the artificial scarcity of the real world so that they can profit from it, see the recent land rush in some nascent proto-Metaverse platforms, where people are betting that their purchase will have some medium-term value and an appreciating long-term value.

But this is also similar to the idea that some people want their MMORPGs to have a single, non-sharded instance, where everybody can play at once, which sounds hellish to me TBH. Millions of people all competing for the same items, quests, etc. If you were offered a VR version of Disneyland, which would you prefer? One where there were very few people and you could walk more or less directly onto the rides? Or one where the streets are packed and the queue times are multiple-hours long?

The rush to reproduce these less desirable experiences in VR is utterly depressing, and for that matter the descriptions of The Street in Snow Crash didn't sound that appealing to me either.

[hinkley]

There's a happy medium where the scarcity is logarithmic rather than volume versus area (what is that, n^2/3?).

You could have a row of clubs on The Street that are proportional to each other but not to their interiors. All clubs are 5 meters wide. Large clubs are 7 meters wide, and massive clubs go to 10. You can look at the outside and predict what's going on beneath without walking by a SuperWalmart.

And then I believe it's in Neverwhere (?) where parts of the spaces of the Underground are borrowed from other places. So the average density is always the same but pockets can still be made.

[hinkley]

Continuing this thought instead of editing:

If you're worried about how to handle physics, a really simple solution here would be to slice your VR onto multiple planes of existence, from outside to inside. You have a virtual street full of fifty businesses, you can lay out the insides of the business into a Euclidean space, and then doorways are wormholes from a less dense plane to a more dense one, so you can walk around the block faster than you can walk through one of the buildings. Recurse that for as many layers of tesseract as you want to implement (why not rooms in the building that are bigger than the inside of the building too?). But once you've broken 1:1 people are going to want to change their minds, so you might be better off using some sort of graph to represent space instead of a 3d matrix.