Facebook will be called Meta in the future and will bundle all of its technologies and apps under a new brand into a single “Metaverse”, as Facebook CEO and founder Marc Zuckerberg announced at Connect 2021 .
VR and AR should bring reality into the metaverse
According to Zuckerberg in his founding letter, the company's aim is to bring this metaverse to life and enable people to network with friends and family, to find communities and to build new companies. Online and reality should merge more closely.
In the metaverse, today's social online experiences merge with the real world. It is enriched by completely virtual, three-dimensional experiences and projections.
Marc Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta
As part of a keynote at the in-house Connect 2021 conference, Marc Zuckerberg also informed the participants how this step into the metaverse should succeed, which “enables shared virtual experiences that could never take place in reality”. CNET has made the complete keynote by Marc Zuckerberg available on YouTube, in which the meta boss explains the tools with which reality should be integrated into the metaverse.
During the ten-minute keynote, it also becomes clear that the Metaversum is primarily a future project that, with the help of an investment of 150 million US dollars and on the basis of the so-called “presence platform”, is the next generation of mixed Reality on the virtual reality headset Oculus Quest 2 will be created. In this way, “the next generations” of the content creators should also be trained for the project. In its Meta Design Blog and meta.com, the company provides information about the changes to Facebook that have taken place so far, which preceded the renaming to Meta.
When Facebook was founded in 2004, it revolutionized the way people network and exchange ideas. Apps like Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp have given billions of people new ways of communicating.
Now Meta is breaking the boundaries of two-dimensionality and is relying on immersive experiences such as augmented reality and virtual reality to contribute to the further development of social technologies.
Meta
Die Terminology Metaverse or “Metaverse” was widely used in the technical context by the former chief strategist at Amazon Studios, Matthew Ball, who also explains the background on his website.
Family of Apps and Reality Labs
“Our corporate structure will not change,” asserts the group in its official press release, but the way in which Meta will report on its finances will differ from Facebook's. In future, the company will provide information about its finances in the two operational areas “Family of Apps” and “Reality Labs”. On the US stock exchange, Meta will no longer be listed under the abbreviation FB2A but under MVRS from December 1st.
Our corporate structure will not change, but the way in which we will report on our finances will. As of the fourth quarter 2021 results, we plan to report on two operational units: The Family of Apps and the Reality Labs.
We also intend to trade under the new Stock ticker, MVRS that we have reserved to record on December 1st. Today's announcement has no influence on how we use or pass on data.
Meta
Facebook was last seen after the revelations by US computer scientist and whistleblower Frances Haugen strong in criticism. From 2018 to 2021 she worked as a senior product manager for Facebook and heavily burdened the group with the “Facebook Files” published in the Wall Street Journal in September.