Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is also phasing out the Oculus brand name.
Instead, the company plans on using the newly announced Meta brand on its VR headset products going forward, according to Andrew Bosworth, who’s now Meta’s chief technology officer. “Starting in early 2022, you’ll start to see the shift from Oculus Quest from Facebook to Meta Quest and Oculus App to Meta Quest App over time,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
The other Facebook brand facing retirement is Portal, the name for the company’s smart display products. “Over the next few months, you’ll see a phased rollout of the brand across all the relevant products and services — including Facebook Portal to Meta Portal,” Bosworth added.
In addition, Facebook Reality Labs is simply becoming Reality Labs. The name changes occurs as Facebook/Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg prioritizes building a new virtual reality platform called the metaverse, which he envisions will become the future of the internet and computing.
“In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today,” Zuckerberg said during a speech at the Facebook Connect event on Thursday.
The goal is to bring 1 billion people into the metaverse over the next decade. But it’ll require groundbreaking advancements in computing and networking. In the meantime, the company is hoping a name change will get people thinking about the metaverse (vs. whistleblowers).
“When people buy our products, we want them to clearly understand that all of these devices come from Meta and ladder up to our metaverse vision,” Bosworth wrote in his post. “That’s why we’re evolving our brand across our current lines of hardware in-market, as well as for all future products, in order to bring more consistency across the portfolio and more transparency to consumers.
“While we’re retiring the name, I can assure you that the original Oculus vision remains deeply embedded in how Meta will continue to drive mass adoption for VR today,” he added.