The Meta Umbrella brand will rise above services like Facebook or Instagram in the future, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday. With the new name, Zuckerberg wants to focus on the new virtual world “Metaverse,” in which he also sees digital communications and the future of his company.
He wants to use this to lead the group more firmly from the shadow of its parent and by far the most important platform, Facebook. Apart from Instagram, the company group also includes WhatsApp and Messenger chat apps. These individual services will bear their own name.
“Today we are seen as a social media company, but at heart we are a company that connects people,” Zuckerberg said. The Facebook name was no longer able to reflect the full range of products offered by the group.
According to the presentation by the 37-year-old Facebook founder, the physical and digital worlds have to come together in a “metaverse”. On the one hand, Zuckerberg relies on virtual reality (VR), in which users can immerse themselves in the digital world with special glasses on their heads. Facebook Group bought Oculus, a leading VR company in glasses for virtual reality displays, seven years ago. The Oculus brand name is now being phased out. The existing VR glasses will be called Meta Quest instead of Oculus Quest.
Facebook’s founders also see so-called augmented reality (AR) as a “metaverse” component, in which digital content is shown to viewers in a real environment on displays or with the help of projector glasses.
“We believe that the “Metaverse” will be the successor to the mobile Internet,” Zuckerberg emphasized. Everything related to the “Metaverse” in the group will be given priority on Facebook. The group is expanding its virtual “Metaverse” world under the name “Horizon”.
At Connect, the in-house developer conference, Zuckerberg gave his most detailed description of his “Metaverse” concept yet. It will be a virtual world in which you can immerse yourself even more deeply, to the facial expressions of the people around you. “Instead of looking at a screen, you’ll be right in the middle of these experiences.”
The feeling of being there is the defining characteristic of the “metaverse,” he emphasized. “If I send a video of my kids to my parents, they’ll feel like they’re with us.” At first it was unclear what technical means beyond VR headsets should be used to implement this presence effect.
With “Horizon Home,” the Facebook founder announced a new, more “social” home for Oculus users. However, this area looks very similar to the initial area that VR glasses users already find today. What’s new is that users can access rooms and virtual objects beyond the boundaries of an individual game or event.
The Facebook founder said physical objects would be able to be scanned so that they also exist in the “metaverse”. Plus, they can be projected into the real world as holograms. Much of this will be part of everyday life in the next five to ten years, Zuckerberg stressed.
Zuckerberg already said that his company expects to have a billion users in the “metaverse” by 2030 — and is expected to handle several hundred million dollars in business. Facebook is spending $10 billion on development work this year alone.
Zuckerberg’s vision was widely appreciated on the stock exchange. Following the presentation, Facebook’s stock went out of business with a gain of about 1.5 percent. The exchange code of the share is to be changed from “FB” to “MVRS” on 1st December on the basis of “Metaverse”.
Facebook also emphasized that the announcement did not change the way the company handles data. The group has come under enormous pressure over the past few weeks from internal documents made public by a former employee. Francis Haugen appears as a whistleblower and accuses Facebook of putting profit above the well-being of its users.
Facebook isn’t the first Silicon Valley corporation to change its name to indicate that the company’s direction has expanded. For example, in 2015, Google placed a new holding company called Alphabet on the group. The internet company wanted to indicate that it not only operates a search engine and cloud business, but also has ambitions for driverless cars, health solutions and other high-tech areas. However, nearly all of Alphabet’s earnings are still generated by Google, and other companies are only posting losses at lower levels. Google boss Sundar Pichai is also now at the top of the alphabet.
Facebook shares started rallying on Thursday after a long decline since its record high in early September. After it became known that in the future the group would be called Meta, investors suddenly took the initiative. Facebook shares rose 1.51 percent to $316.92 on the Nasdaq. It was once again lighter in the early trading period, hitting its lowest level in five months at $308.11.
Facebook shares fell nearly 20 percent from a record high of $384 to a daily low.
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