In the wake of a rough couple of weeks for Facebook that saw the company come under fire after being accused of contributing to mental health problems in teenage girls, Mark Zuckerberg announced a shift in direction for the company and the creation of the “metaverse.”
The first step in this shift was renaming the company. The app and website are still named Facebook, but the company behind the social network and other apps such as Instagram and Whatsapp will now be known as Meta.
Many are still confused about what exactly the metaverse is and what it will entail. So far, Zuckerberg has presented it as a way of doing everything virtually in the future.
It will be accessible through wearable devices, like smart glasses and virtual reality headsets, and through the use of smartphone apps and other devices. The company has shown off the ability to do things such as attending work in a virtual environment as an avatar of one’s choosing and using a device on the wrist to text one’s friends.
The goal is for the metaverse to be just like the physical world but extended virtually into a place where people can shop, work, socialize, play video games and more.
The term “metaverse” is not a new one. It was first used in the 1992 dystopian science fiction novel “Snow Crash,” in which the metaverse was a combination of virtual realities that people could walk through as avatars.
Many games have had metaverse elements in the past, but never reached the point that Zuckerberg is trying to reach.
“Fortnite,” along with its normal game modes, has also featured concerts and museums within its world. “Second Life” was a PC game in which a person could do pretty much anything, and many used the game to try and escape reality and form a new version of their life in the virtual world.
The metaverse will not be owned by Meta, though, and Zuckerberg envisions it as a decentralized world operated by users.
“The metaverse is a vision that spans many companies — the whole industry,” Zuckerberg said in a July interview with The Verge. “You can think about it as the successor to the mobile internet.
“And it’s certainly not something that any one company is going to build, but I think a big part of our next chapter is going to hopefully be contributing to building that, in partnership with a lot of other companies and creators and developers. But you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it.”
Meta will simply be a company contributing to the metaverse if it’s even something that catches on. The announcement has come under heavy criticism, though this could still be from backlash over the whistleblower incident.
“Is this what most people want? The ability to attend virtual meetings as avatars drifting through a pretend corporate Death Star?” said Hannah Levintova of Mother Jones. “Of course not. But Facebook executives are not ‘most people.’ Unlike many of their nearly 3 billion users, they exist in some of the most vaunted ranks of the professional managerial class.”
Despite the criticisms, many companies are gearing up to stake their claim in the metaverse. For example, Unity purchased Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital to start preparing for it. The company plans to use Weta Digital to build 3D models in the metaverse.
“The unified tools and the incredible scientists and technologists of Weta Digital will accelerate our mission to give content creators easy to use and high performance tools to bring their visions to life,” Marc Whitten, Unity’s senior vice president and general manager, said in a company blog post on Nov. 9. “Whatever the metaverse is or will be, we believe it will be built by content creators, just like you.”
