Facebook’s Metaverse : Facebook changes its company name to Meta

facebook metaverse conference

Facebook unveiled a series of new moves in augmented and virtual reality on Thursday, as part of its longer-term effort to help build a “metaverse” that will bring physically distant people closer together.

Facebook changes its company name to Meta

Facebook Inc said on Thursday it would rebrand as Meta, a name change that comes as the company battles criticisms from lawmakers and regulators over its market power, its algorithmic decisions and the policing of abuses on its platforms.

The tech giant said the change would bring together its different apps and technologies under one new brand. It said it would not change its corporate structure.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the company’s live-streamed virtual and augmented reality conference, said the new name reflected its focus on building the metaverse.

The metaverse, a term first coined in a dystopian novel three decades ago and now attracting buzz in Silicon Valley, refers broadly to the idea of a shared virtual environment which can be accessed by people using different devices.

Who’s Building Facebook’s Metaverse? Meet CTO Andrew Bosworth

Before the wave of stories published on Oct. 25 revealed new details about the troubling ways Facebook Inc.

facebook meta

runs its social networks, the company had been hoping to spend the week talking about its plans to expand beyond that business. A major theme at its annual Connect conference beginning on Oct. 28 will be the company’s ambitions for the so-called metaverse, a new digital space that it believes will supplant smartphone apps as the primary form of online interaction. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has said pursuing this path will transform Facebook, and has publicly set a goal of attracting 1 billion users to the metaverse by the end of the decade.

Bosworth

The metaverse has played a prominent role in science fiction for decades—the digital universes of the novels Snow Crash and Ready Player One, where characters live parallel digital lives to their physical existences, are metaverses.

Video games such as Roblox and Fortnite are also similar to what Facebook has in mind.

The idea is that smartphones are reaching their limitations in creating immersive computing experiences, and people will hunger to go further, opting to engage in three-dimensional digital interactions, for example, instead of doing video chats. “You can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet,” Zuckerberg told the tech news website the Verge last summer, “where instead of just viewing content, you are in it.” The person in charge is Andrew Bosworth, a longtime executive and close friend of Zuckerberg’s who will take over as chief technology officer in early 2022. “We want to give people a glimpse into that vision, into that future,” says Bosworth, 39, known within the company as Boz. He describes the conference as a “love letter to the future of the metaverse.”
Facebook has been laying the foundation for this project since at least 2014, when it acquired the virtual-reality headset maker Oculus. Bosworth took over Facebook’s virtual- and augmented-reality efforts in 2017, and his elevation to CTO signals how high a priority the project is inside the company. Facebook recently said it would hire 10,000 people in Europe over the next five years to help create the metaverse. In its most recent earnings report, on Oct. 25, it said its operating profit will be down $10 billion in 2021 because of investments in the division building the metaverse, and it plans to increase that spending for years before making any real money from it.

Facebook is playing both offense and defense here. If the metaverse becomes the next way of interacting online, the company will benefit from having had a hand in its design. Facebook has also long been aware that its access to users relies on such companies as Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google and their devices and operating systems, a vulnerability that has been highlighted by Facebook’s recent dispute with Apple over ad targeting. Facebook thinks that people will access the metaverse from their smartphones, but that increasingly they’ll use devices like the Facebook-owned Oculus VR headsets, which would be an obvious coup.
Facebook has already invested more heavily in the field than many people realize, says Tom Mainelli, vice president for device and consumer research at the research firm IDC.

He sees the metaverse as key to the company’s plans to “diversify future revenue streams, cement its position in the next computing platform, and potentially rewrite its company narrative going forward.”

To fulfill its ambitions, Facebook will likely need cooperation from both a skeptical public and competitors it’s trying to circumvent—the metaverse idea only really works if Apple and Google users can play, too. Otherwise, says Bosworth, it’s just a bunch of universes.

The company is betting it can build the metaverse in a way that brings other companies along. Bosworth, who has been at Facebook for more than 15 years, has played a role in the creation of almost every one of its core products.

He helped build News Feed, the main way people engage with the social network and the company’s core moneymaker, as well as Facebook Groups, Messenger, and the network’s ads team. For the past four years he’s been running Facebook Reality Labs, the company’s futuristic division building virtual-reality headsets, in-home speakers, and augmented-reality sunglasses. Zuckerberg considers him a close friend; their kids play together, and when Bosworth’s home was under construction he rented a house from Zuckerberg, moving in next door.

How Facebook plans to build its metaverse

Facebook unveiled a series of new moves in augmented and virtual reality on Thursday, as part of its longer-term effort to help build a “metaverse” that will bring physically distant people closer together.

Between the lines: Facebook has said this is its next major push, but it comes as the company is under intense scrutiny for how it is managing the impact of its existing services.

Details: The company is using its annual Facebook Connect conference to outline a series of new features and products, as well as some investments to spur adoption of the technologies. Among them:

Horizon Home: Facebook is making the home screen on Oculus Quest more social, allowing friends to gather, watch videos together and dive into games and apps.

Messenger calling in VR: This will start with being able to call from VR and eventually that will be a launch point for hanging out in virtual reality.
Bringing more 2D apps to VR: More than 20 apps are coming to Horizon Home, with the ability to be placed on a virtual screen. Apps include productivity titles like Slack and Dropbox as well as Facebook’s own services, including Instagram. Developers will also be able to offer their own progressive web apps for use in VR.
Horizon Marketplace: The company plans to operate its own marketplace where creators and developers can sell their own virtual goods.
On the augmented reality front, Facebook is adding hand and body tracking to its Spark AR developer tools as well as Polar, a new app that allows people to create augmented reality filters without needing to code.
To spur usage of its new tools and features, Facebook is creating a $150 million fund.
Project Cambria: During the event, Facebook previewed a new high-end consumer headset that it says will be released next year, along with a high-end price tag. The headset will feature improved optics and color pass-through video of the real world.

The big picture: Facebook is investing billions in its metaverse push. On its earnings call this week, the company said investments in its augmented and virtual reality efforts will dent operating earnings by $10 billion this year.

The metaverse, Facebook said, isn’t just about AR and VR, acknowledging that people will access the virtual world using a range of new devices — including headsets and glasses — along with existing PCs and smartphones.
Facebook also stressed that it hopes it is building tools that will be used in a single metaverse rather than a world where there are many different, disconnected virtual worlds.

What they’re saying: Speaking briefly to a group of reporters, CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the many controversies surrounding Facebook, but stressed the importance of continuing to invest in a years-out future.

“There are clearly important issues to be working on in the present,” Zuckerberg said. “We are taking that very seriously. We will continue to focus on that.”
At the same time, he said there will always be problems, but “we are here to create things.”

Is Facebook’s Focus on the Metaverse Good or Bad News for Roblox?

Facebook is already making moves to become a metaverse company.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is leading the charge.
Roblox could benefit in a world where most people know about the metaverse.

Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) is developing plans to enter the metaverse. In case you are unfamiliar, the metaverse is a virtual environment where people can interact with each other and their surroundings.

One company that will feel the direct impact of Facebook’s decision is Roblox (NYSE:RBLX). It already operates a metaverse platform with millions of daily active users, but it’s in jeopardy of losing out to Facebook. Still, the effects of Facebook’s entry need not be adverse for Roblox as it could benefit from the increased attention on the metaverse.

Facebook

Meta, Inc. (formerly known as Facebook, Inc. until 2021) is an American multinational technology company based in Menlo Park, California.

It was founded in 2004 as TheFacebook by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, roommates and students at Harvard College.

The social networking service eventually became Facebook, amassing 2.9 billion monthly users by 2021.

The company acquired Instagram in 2012, then WhatsApp and Oculus in 2014. It is one of the world’s most valuable companies and is considered one of the Big Five companies in U.S. information technology, alongside Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. The company generates substantially all of its revenue by selling advertisement placements to marketers.

Meta offers other products and services, including Facebook Messenger, Facebook Watch, and Facebook Portal. It has also acquired Giphy and Mapillary, and has a 9.99% stake in Jio Platforms.

In October 2021, media outlets reported that the parent company planned to change its name to “reflect its focus on building the metaverse”, and it was renamed as Meta, Inc later that month

Metaverse

The word “Metaverse” is derived from the prefix “meta” (meaning beyond) and the stem “verse” (a back-formation from “universe”); the term is typically used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the Internet, made up of persistent, shared, 3D virtual spaces linked into a perceived virtual universe.

The metaverse in a broader sense may not only refer to virtual worlds, but Internet as a whole, including the entire spectrum of augmented reality.

virtual reality

Virtual reality (VR) is a simulated experience that can be similar to or completely different from the real world.

Applications of virtual reality include entertainment (e.g. video games), education (e.g. medical or military training) and business (e.g. virtual meetings). Other distinct types of VR-style technology include augmented reality and mixed reality, sometimes referred to as extended reality or XR.