1996, it was announced that writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff would adapt the novel for The Kennedy/Marshall Company and Touchstone Pictures with Brambilla attached to direct the film. While the film did not get made, Brambilla's interest on the subject continued in his work as an artist. One of Brambilla's earliest works Halflife is a multi-channel video installation that juxtaposes surveillance footage of video gamers in cyber-cafés playing the popular MMOG Counter-Strike with a live video feed of the game world in which they are playing. Through Halflife, Brambilla conjures Debord's spectacle, Stephenson's metaverse, as well as Jean Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality, exploring not only the "breakdown of the dialectic between reality and virtuality", but also "poignantly [illuminates] the psychology of the individual within shared spaces and our ambivalent relationship to the spectacle." Brambilla has used digital technologies, particularly virtual reality, to explore the concept of the Metaverse. In 2016, he adapted "Creation," one of four artworks from his Megaplex series, for virtual reality, which he described as "more of an experience medium; more about spectatorship and putting you in an environment you wouldn't necessarily be comfortable being put in ... its very much in synch with the way we communicate culturally through social media, through the immersiveness of our connected world. Although it's not a visual thing, it's an emotional thing. We feel more connected in more places, able to experience more points of view, tastes, friendships, more of everything. And VR is everything all the time. You put on the visor and you're literally inside an interface that can be used for anything. Brambilla also adapted "Heaven's Gate" for virtual reality, which first screened at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in November 2021 using twenty virtual reality headsets, allowing a large group to experience the work simultaneously. Brambilla has compared today's conception of the Metaverse with the Dada movement of the early twentieth century in terms of disrupting traditional modes of thinking. "Today, an entire generation of artists and collectors arguably spend more time in the digital realm than the physical," he said in an interview with SuperRare. "This speaks directly to how we interact and engage with every kind of visual. Dada was all about the ephemeral and today some of us are living in an entirely ephemeral state – the Metaverse." Similarly, in 2021, Brambilla curated a collection of nine non-fungible tokens by Simon Denny, Rachel Rossin and