Facebook is renaming itself Meta to reflect the company’s new priority on building a virtual reality world dubbed the metaverse.
“We are going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first,” Mark Zuckerberg said during a speech at the Facebook Connect event on Thursday.
Zuckerberg announced the new brand after talking up his company’s ambitious goal of creating a VR world similar to what’s depicted in the hit sci-fi book Ready Player One, where virtual reality becomes so good it dominates people’s lives, becoming a new way to live, work, and play.
“Our mission remains the same: It’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and our brands, they’re not changing either. And we are still the company that designs technology around people. But now we have a new North Star. To help bring the metaverse to life,” Zuckerberg said.
As a result, Zuckerberg is dropping Facebook as the name for the parent company. “Building our social media apps will always be an important focus for us. But right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today, let alone in the future,” he added.
To underscore the company’s new focus, Zuckerberg prepared an elaborate one-hour keynote that relied on Hollywood-like special effects to depict how he hopes the metaverse will one day take shape in real life. According to him, the technology can improve to the point where VR experiences will feel close to real life.
For example, one demo involved two friends attending a music concert, except one of them does so virtually. The two friends then join a concert afterparty in VR, where they can buy virtual NFT items and mingle with celebrity guests.
“The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence—like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That is why we are focused on building this,” Zuckerberg said.
The other aim is to ensure the metaverse remains an open ecosystem. So if you buy an item in one VR experience, such as an outfit your avatar, you'll be able to take it with you into another VR world.
The goal will take decades to accomplish—assuming it's even possible and that people will embrace it. The same presentation also largely ignored the real-world limitations of VR. Instead, the demos portrayed it as simply putting on a pair of glasses or pressing a button to launch a hologram. In reality, VR headsets can be big, pricey and clunky. They also need power, can occasionally cause motion sickness, and look a tad ridiculous.
Hence, the future Zuckeberg hopes to create will require game-changing improvements to computing and networking. However, the same presentation also previewed several technologies Facebook is working on to make the metaverse into a reality. They include near-term products such as a new VR headset called Project Cambria that’s arriving next year.
"This isn’t a Quest 2 replacement, or a Quest 3," the company's Oculus Blog says. "Project Cambria will be a high-end device at a higher price point, because it’s going to be packed with all the latest advanced technologies, including improved social presence, color Passthrough, pancake optics, and a lot more."
Over the longer term, Facebook is hoping to one day create photorealistic VR avatars that'll be indistinguishable from people. Another project involves using a wristband that can sense your finger and hand movements, and translate them into the digital world.
The company also plans on investing $10 billion this year on its VR/AR division Facebook Reality Labs with more funding to come. "Our hope though is if we all work at it, within the next decade the metaverse will reach a billion people," Zuckerberg added.
The rebranding, meanwhile, comes as Facebook faces criticism for its response to misinformation and abuse on the platform via a flurry of documents turned over to the press and lawmakers by a former product manager. Zuckerberg has been largely defiant in response, blaming the avalanche of bad press for the social network on “a coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture of our company.”