And then there’s the tweaking. “The technology for getting a close fit of how you look isn’t there yet, but in the future I can see people choosing an avatar that’s better looking,” says Linford-Grayson. This could lead to baked-in aesthetic hierarchies, just like in the real world.
That already happens in video games. A 2007 study of gamers conducted by researchers at Stanford University found that people assigned “attractive” avatars behaved more dominantly by standing close to other players. These attractive avatars also disclosed more personal details to strangers who had struck up conversation. Such oddities risk the metaverse—and particularly the corporate metaverse—suffering from what researchers call the Proteus effect. If we’re all like Proteus, the Greek god who could change his physical form as he pleased, then hierarchies and manipulation of our avatars could spell chaos.
Now Zuckerberg has sought to flip the script with a rebrand. Facebook, he announced last week, will henceforth be known as Meta. The move, he said, was part of a “transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company”. In layman’s terms, the metaverse is a sort of 3D version of the internet. Instead of sitting in front of screens, scrolling through newsfeeds, you will be able to “walk around” the metaverse using a VR headset, app or AR glasses. This will create a virtual world of work, play and shopping.
It comes as no surprise then that Mark Zuckerberg thinks the social media giant formerly known as Facebook Inc. had a rebrand. Enter ‘Meta’ — a company committed to building a ‘metaverse’, the ‘next chapter of social connection’. The apps held under this umbrella company will stay the same; the motive is to put distance between Facebook’s tarnished name and the future it envisions — The Metaverse.
Many have already pointed out how boring the Zuckerverse looks. Most of us have already been living in that future, be it through the organized fun of workplace social apps or through video games like Fortnite. And while the video game metaverse offers plenty of room for imagination and connection, the corporate metaverse risks repeating and potentially magnifying the flaws of the real world.
In the future users would no longer need to have a Facebook account to use its other services, he confirmed, a decision that will prove popular with users reluctant to link their personal social media accounts to use the company’s Oculus virtual reality headset, among others.
Given Facebook’s track record, this makes for grim reading. Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal (where millions of Facebook users’ data was improperly obtained to build voter profiles), Facebook has come to be seen as a force for ill. The rebrand clearly isn’t only about the company’s broader commitment to building the metaverse, it’s crucially also about distancing itself from the myriad scandals that have enveloped it. And the scandals are weighty. Most recently, came the shocking revelations of what has become known as the ‘Facebook Papers’.
Thousands of pages of documents, leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen, reveal that the company has exaggerated its efforts to reduce harmful content. Facebook’s algorithms have been caught red-handed in exacerbating poor mental health in teenage users, accelerating political polarisation, and fueling misinformation and conspiracy theories. These are not the kind of charges that will magically disappear. But a brand-new image will help mitigate the impact considerably.
Essentially, it’s a world of endless, interconnected virtual communities where people can meet, work and play, using virtual reality headsets, augmented reality glasses, smartphone apps or other devices.
Bringing together all of its apps and technologies, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, under the new umbrella, the latest transformation aims to develop a hybrid of today’s online social experiences. Presented as an evolution of social technology, the metaverse looks to be an immersive space that allows users to do things together that are not possible in the physical world.
Those already there report mixed results. Eileen Quirk Baumann, president of tech marketing firm Uncork-it, a marketing and PR agency, works in a permanent Gather.town office, as well as the bricks-and-mortar space in Blacksburg, Virginia. Her main priority when choosing an avatar is to accurately match what she looks like in real life so an online connection can continue offline. “I enjoy the smooth youthful glow and sparkling eyes of all the avatars. No eyedrops, no makeup—just land and go,” Baumann says. She’s noticed that as colleagues spend more time on the platform, they also spend more time finessing their features to reflect their true selves.
Unfettered by the risks of mass metaverse adoption—or, less excitingly, lots of companies using remote collaboration tools—a gaggle of startups are piling in to sell the future. The most well-known virtual workspace tool is Gather.town, which amassed 4 million users in just over a year as the pandemic took hold. Its retro, pixelated design is intentionally basic, while Roblox’s Loom.ai and Teeoh use sophisticated graphics for more realistic virtual worlds.
The preeminent simulation platform Second Life was adopted by Cisco and IBM over a decade ago. Despite virtual and augmented reality companies consistently promising the world and failing to deliver, a 2020 report from consultancy PwC predicts that nearly 23.5 million jobs worldwide will use AR and VR by 2030 for tasks such as employee training, meetings, and customer service.
The fashion industry has already made a number of advancements into the metaverse arena, in the form of gaming collaborations, digitally designed collections and virtual reality production. Pandemic-related matters have further pushed the industry into exploring the online sphere, with many brands turning to virtual presentations in place of physical events.
McNamee says that the Facebook papers have undermined its claims to being nothing more than a neutral communication network. What the papers show beyond any doubt, McNamee says “is that it is a social network of nearly three billion people that has no boundaries, no safety nets and with a business model that is about attention. And the way to grab attention is to inflame extreme emotions.” When did it go wrong for Zuckerberg and his merry band of tech bros? McNamee cites 2013 as a pivotal year.
That was when the dreaded algorithm started to determine what was promoted on our newsfeeds. The code that determines who sees what on social media is at the heart of the problem. It creates perverse incentives and prioritises divisive and extreme content over the inoffensive, bringing out the worst in users.
Companies big and small have been testing avatar-based platforms for remote and hybrid working since Covid-19 lockdowns began. Using Oculus VR headsets, Facebook’s Horizon Workrooms envisages a near future in which people meet virtually in a soulless, floaty virtual world. Microsoft’s Mesh for Hololens 2 hopes to facilitate similarly corporate mixed reality meetups, and Canadian ecommerce platform Shopify just launched its browser-based game Shopify Party, in which employees appear as their chosen avatars to spice up one-to-ones, icebreakers, standups, and other team events.
Facebook is dedicating 10,000-20,000 engineers to develop its metaverse technology. The UK’s recently appointed secretary of state for digital, Nadine Dorries, this week took aim at Facebook’s metaverse plans by suggesting that the web giant should dedicate a similar level of resources to improving safety on its existing platform. She mentioned the UK’s incoming Online Harms Bill, intended in large part to deal with the various problems of social media.
It’s quite easy to envision Meta’s potential. If it becomes the first company to make this augmented reality possible, it can capitalise from the sales of the hardware and software needed to build it. What Apple is to mobile phones, Meta could be to the metaverse — eventually monopolising it. The idea is worrying, as it’s a monopoly on several levels. It wouldn’t just control the market in virtual reality. Meta could determine what’s sold to you, what you see, what you hear, and even who you talk to.
It’s integral to the idea of the metaverse because Zuckerberg believes we’ll all be using virtual reality headsets to teleport ourselves into a virtual space where we’ll work, play and communicate with others.
The 37-year old also detailed the company’s ambitions to build the metaverse, a theoretical digital universe with its origins in 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, that Facebook projects will allow us to work, shop, learn and play in virtual reality spaces.
“In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up,” Zuckerberg claims. And it’ll all happen through virtual reality headsets, as the company demonstrated back in August in a cringeworthy presentation to the press.
Since Facebook’s announcement, Microsoft has revealed its own metaverse plans, which will see it add 3D virtual avatars and environments to its Teams messaging system – with or without a virtual reality headset.
It’s easy, judging from the stilted promotional videos Meta have released, to dismiss the metaverse as the latest ravings of Mr Zuckerberg. But as the above examples show, it’s actually an incredibly viable business idea. The world, especially after Covid-19, has become a lot more reliant on technology. Universities are largely partly online, and business meetings increasingly happen over Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Would it not be the logical step forward to have virtual avatars at business meetings, as opposed to grainy Zoom calls? Given that the world is heading in that direction anyway, that’s the bet Meta is making. The early bird gets the worm.
If businesses adopt any of the many virtual workspaces, working out protocol and how they should be doing things is key. And if something isn’t working, companies should be ready to adapt their approach—or drop a platform completely. Doug Safreno, founder of virtual meeting startup Pragli, which he refers to as a “metaverse provider,” wants to ensure his company delivers a fair representation of identity. “It’s incumbent on us to ensure we are champions of inclusiveness, and not further marginalizing certain communities,” he says.
The change is an attempt to bring focus to its work on the “metaverse”, as it refers to a host of augmented and virtual reality features that it claims will be the future of social networking.
Facebook, which recently rebranded as “Meta”, won positive comment from privacy advocates on Tuesday when it revealed it is shutting down its Face Recognition scan system. The technology was launched in 2010 and is used to automatically tag people in photos and videos on the platform. The company said it would also delete more than a billion people’s facial recognition templates.
Feedback from Meta's Oculus virtual reality headset users was that the technology, which was improving all the time, could be "incredibly fun".
“I sport a man-bun IRL and so does my avatar, albeit his is blue—my hair is actually red,” says Dan Corcoran, managing director of recruitment firm Reedmace Solutions. “Other people pick similar skin tones and facial features, but will have a huge bow in their hair or a bright outfit.” Gee Linford-Grayson, a partnerships manager at Patreon, has been experimenting with virtual worlds platform Virbela. For one event, she matched her IRL neon polo neck to her avatar’s and threw on a cowboy hat to match a colleague’s. “It was a kind of corporate uniform, but a silly one,” she says. “The difficulty with avatars is that the social norms haven’t been set yet, so it’s tricky to navigate.” She predicts that the tension between wanting to be professional and show personality could conjure as many gripes as it does in the real world.
For businesses, the most interesting benefit of avatars, a video game staple pioneered by NASA employees in the 1970s, is the sense of digital proximity, without needing to focus on facial expressions—the cause of the much-maligned Zoom fatigue. And while self-expression is the allure of video game avatars, it’s not yet clear what employees gain from being asked to exist in the corporate metaverse.
While the social media platform itself will still retain the Facebook name, the umbrella company will now be known as Meta, which chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said symbolised for him that there was “always more to build”.
It’s not just that the metaverse Zuckerberg is building looks like a slightly janky version of The Sims, with avatars eerily typing three inches above their digitised keyboards and lacking legs if you peek under the desk at which they supposedly sit. I’ve spent enough time in a similar virtual universe, the video game Second Life, to know that this bold new future world has been predicted before, and nothing came of it.
Facebook said it believed some facial recognition use cases, such as verification and account recovery, had potential. Laura Petrone, principal analyst in the thematic research team at GlobalData, speculated that facial recognition could one day be a “key technology” in Facebook’s ambition to become a metaverse company.
However, Facebook has since clarified that it is already looking at ways to use biometrics in its metaverse business. The company previously said it won’t delete “Deepface”, the AI engine behind the face scan technology, but now it seems that this technology may be repurposed almost immediately to serve its metaverse plans.
It’s a future version of the internet. It will be a hyper-realistic, alternative world consisting of virtual reality, augmented reality and video. At first, it will be accessible through a VR headset or glasses but how it will manifest later may change.
The company’s corporate structure is not set to change, but Zuckerberg did address specific bumps in the road that have been “humbling” for the business. In his letter, he outlines the importance of privacy and safety in the metaverse, as well as new forms of governance and ecosystems to enable users to become creators in a safe and secure manner.
Ultimately, Meta’s plans are to build technologies that help people connect, find communities and grow businesses, moving away from 2-dimensional screens towards more immersive experiences, like AR.
“Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future,” he said. “Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards.
The only concrete announcement beyond the name change was a new, more expensive virtual reality headset named “Cambria”. Even that had scant details and will not be available until next year.
Mr Zuckerberg said the name “Facebook” does not reflect everything the company did, pointing to existing separate apps such as Instagram and its Oculus virtual reality platform.
Some see this as an attempt to transition from a “social media giant” to something more. It’s a change of direction that places them as a frontrunner in the tech industry. It could also be driven by the desire to be the first to build a new revolution in technology.
70% of human communication is non-verbal. Creating personalised avatars that use body language and complex facial expressions in real-time will be a game-changer for online interactions. There may come the point where you can connect your avatar to a form of ID. This will help in the protection of minors and create new accessibility options.
Despite what the new name, “Meta”, might suggest, the company isn’t seeking ownership of the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg states they want people to “transition from seeing us primarily as a social media company to seeing us as a metaverse company”.
But the Facebook story hasn’t quite worked out that way. With more than 2.5 billion users and a suite of products that includes WhatsApp and Instagram, the social network has conquered the world. However, Zuckerberg, 37, has gone from tech saviour to pariah — his company accused of everything from undermining democracy and collaborating with autocrats to triggering a teenage mental health crisis and abetting human trafficking. Today, Facebook been accused of helping promote censorship in Kazakhstan, by allowing the state to flag “illegal” online content.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Whilst a metaverse owned by Zuckerberg is a chilling thought, it’s unlikely to be the paradigm shift he hopes for. Will the metaverse replace the physical universe? No. Recent history is littered with examples of promising technology that failed to live up to expectations. When the Kindle came out physical publishing was written off as dead. Yet books are still here with us because far too many people love the feel and weight of a good book. Similarly, no one, I’m sure, would rather go to a virtual restaurant or a virtual club in place of the phenomenal thrill of a live experience.
The metaverse will have loads of experiences, including games, social networks, videos, shopping, health and fitness and more.
As part of the Connect conference, developers and creators in various aspects of the technology industry came together to discuss the possibilities of the new virtual reality over the next decade.
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Our choice of workplace avatars will change our behavior, but also affect how our managers and colleagues perceive us. Anita Williams Woolley, who teaches organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University, believes this is especially pertinent for women. “When people make comments about a woman’s appearance, it leads them to underestimate her ability, her intellect, and to see her as less competent,” she says. Sexist comments didn’t dissipate when more meetings took place virtually—a 2020 survey by employment law firm Slater and Gordon found that 34 percent of British women were asked to wear more makeup or change their hair, while 27 percent were told to “dress more sexy or provocatively.” If the internet has amplified societal flaws, the metaverse risks supercharging them.
Facebook the app will keep its name, and Meta will refer only to the parent company that also owns other apps such as WhatsApp and Instagram. As such, it is similar to the rebrand of Google into Alphabet – which kept the name for the search engine, but changed the branding of the umbrella company in recognition of its other work.
It’s not just that I’d worry about every conversation, every word I typed, and every foible and fear I have being mined for monetary gain by a company that continues to post bumper profits. It’s that we’re too reliant on tech titans already to transact large parts of our lives; and the issues it’s raised – as well as the catastrophic sense of loss we feel when these platforms fall offline, as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram did earlier this year – have been too meaningful for me.
“For any potential future applications of technologies like this, we’ll continue to be public about intended use, how people can have control over these systems and their personal data, and how we’re living up to our responsible innovation framework,” Grosse said, recycling comments made in the original announcement.
Facebook said its commitment to scrap face scan technology will not apply to its “metaverse”, a virtual world that has been branded “dystopian” by the tech giant’s critics and which is described by the company as being its future.
“Facebook Metaverse” has been the talk of the online town since the social media giant rebranded to “Meta”, and people are still getting to grips with it.
“Until recently, Facebook was able to deflect criticism by creating the illusion that it was really a question of free speech,” says McNamee. “What Haugen has done is to eliminate that problem completely, because it is super obvious that the problem is Facebook’s culture and Facebook’s business model. There is no problem with Facebook that is not the result of the design of the product or the culture of the company.” For example, both design and culture explain a recently exposed company policy that meant Facebook’s “angry” button with which users could react to each other’s posts was given five times the weighting of the “like” button when it came to deciding what rose to the top of someone’s newsfeeds.
Mark Zuckerberg was the future once. No one embodied the late-noughties’ promise of world-changing interconnectivity offered by social media better than the Harvard dropout whose tech company was supposed to help democratise communication, topple dictators and empower us all.
Obviously, the metaverse will grow and expand over time. So while it may start out as a basic virtual reality alternative, the likelihood is it will become a gigantic part of everyday life in decades to come.
The first will be a virtual reality headset – the best of which is handily made by Meta’s sub-brand Oculus.
Horizon is one app designed to work inside the metaverse The metaverse would not be run by one company, Facebook says, but would instead be an open internet which different companies could build on and offer their own experiences to people.
He showed how through the use of virtual reality goggles and smart glasses, users will be able to add virtual objects to the real world. They could hang out with friends as well as appear in real meetings as holograms, he suggested.
So what does this mean? Just like owning “the internet” was never possible, it’s the same for the metaverse. But, wherever there is new ground, companies are looking to break it. It’s these firms that will significantly control the platform and become industry leaders.
Zuckerberg has announced that it is to invest $10 billion in building that metaverse. In its promise of the transformative power of technology, the move is a return to its founding ethos but sounds positively dystopian.
One of Facebook's earliest investors has labelled the social media giant's plans for a metaverse as "dystopian".
Some of the virtual experiences already exist in some form, but they are all independent and not seamlessly linked together – that is the aim of the metaverse.
It also will incorporate other aspects of online life such as shopping and social media, according to Victoria Petrock, an analyst who follows emerging technologies.
During the annual Connect 2021 conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the organisation Facebook will be changing its name to Meta, as part of the company’s shift to “bring the metaverse to life”.
However, Facebook sees the metaverse as a hugely positive idea. Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg suggests that the metaverse will be a collection of multiple online worlds, not all of them run by Facebook. However, it’s not clear at this stage how these different worlds and the virtual items within them would interact, or if they would be interoperable.
The term metaverse stems from the 1992 dystopian science fiction novel Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, with the word used to describe a virtual reality-based successor to the internet.
As Verdict previously pointed out, scrapping Facial Recognition as such comes at no financial cost to Facebook’s business model because it does not sell its technology or database to third parties. Automatically tagging pictures was a feature designed to give users convenience – albeit with the lurking concern that the database and technology could one day be misused.
There will be countless ways to target your audience within the metaverse. Because the platform will be free to use with no “in-app” processing, individuals can share your brand with no limits or obstacles.
This presents the undeniable potential of products in virtual and augmented reality.
$338 million worth of sales in 2020. Last year Gucci created a virtual world with designer items that players could buy. Someone bought a Gucci handbag for over $4000 (more than it’s worth in real life).
Whether it’s tech innovators, artists or musicians, this is the platform to put yourself out there in an ever-changing world. This also gives an opportunity for content creators to grow.
have the most experience (52%) playing a game inside a shared virtual world, so Gen Z is in pole position for the top clientele of the metaverse. Graphics and processing speeds are constantly improving, meaning we may be looking at complex multiplayer games driving the metaverse machine.
So far, Facebook has attracted new younger users by acquiring apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat, but with anti-monopoly regulators breathing down their necks such purchases have become a lot less straightforward. “Zuckerberg really wants to create this alternate reality,” says McNamee. “He wants to create a world that he’s in charge of and that everybody is a part of.” Escaping the real world might not save his reputation, but, given the news in recent weeks, you can hardly blame him for trying.
The metaverse will be what Kindle is to books rather than what the phone spelt for the fax machine — a convenient option but hardly sufficient. Zuckerberg, wrongly, assumes that the physical world exists mainly to access the virtual one. Not many people think this way. Zuckerberg’s short-sightedness and our politicians’ carelessness cannot be permitted anymore. Otherwise, that polarised and hateful discourse that has become so commonplace on Facebook and Instagram will become our entire reality.
Roblox, a user-generated gaming platform valued at $30bn (£22bn) and with 43 million users around the globe, has its own plans for the metaverse.
Meetings in the metaverse would be far better, he said, with Meta working on how to improve "spatial audio and body language" in virtual reality.
The term metaverse was coined in the 1990s in a science fiction novel Snow Crash, where it served as a virtual reality successor to the internet.
The closest analogy I can think of is the ad tech space. If you think of buying media pre-digital, it used to be very simple. If you wanted to buy advertising on a major platform, you went to a media buyer who aggregated the spending, went to a long lunch with the platform and then your spending was done.
Facebook’s rebranding to Meta has drawn a fair amount of derision from the social giant’s detractors. But the move is undoubtedly significant – one of the world’s largest businesses is clearly betting its future on the metaverse.
Facebook’s metaverse idea would see all the experience accessible in one place and at any point, with users able to enter it not just via VR headsets, but also PCs, games consoles and mobile devices in much the same way they do now with mobile internet.
As a result, some are choosing non-avatar-based virtual platforms to mitigate the strain of customization and transferral of prejudices. Teamflow, used by podcast app Shuffle and being considered by Reddit, represents users with their photo or a stream of a Zoom call instead. Natascha Morgan, operations manager at HeySummit—which has always been fully remote—picked the platform for its customizable office spaces, which include a space-themed room and a breakout zone plastered with memes. “How you present in our team doesn’t matter much anyway, but Teamflow takes away a lot of the pressure,” she says.
The company has been under intense scrutiny from governments and child protection agencies in recent weeks after former worker Frances Haugen leaked documents detailing how the company was struggling to regulate hate speech and misinformationand theextent of its own research into the negative effects its platforms had on young people’s mental health and body image.
But he also noted that much of the technology underpinning the metaverse is yet to be developed, and gave no information about when Facebook plans to release it or what existing technology it has to power it.
Mr Zuckerberg announced his company’s new name during a 90-minute presentation in which he argued that the metaverse will be the future of both his company and the internet.
In recent years, Facebook has looked to push that name even in its other apps, including a rebrand to WhatsApp and Instagram that added “from Facebook” to both of their names in 2019. Comments from Mr Zuckerberg suggested such changes will be reversed, and those will instead be advertised as being from Meta.
“From now on, we’re going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first,” Mr Zuckerberg said. He suggested that Facebook app and branding will be removed from other apps, and that it will instead look to push the new Meta name.
The name, says company founder Mark Zuckerberg, is designed to better represent the company Facebook wants to be. “We are at the beginning of the next chapter for the internet, and it’s the next chapter for our company too,” he wrote in a letter announcing the change. Facebook – now Meta – is more than simply a communications platform or a place for us to upload family photos. It wants to be the public square in which we interact in every aspect of our lives.
Not everyone is excited about Facebook’s metaverse plans. Roger McNamee, an early investor-turned vocal critic of Facebook, said the company “should not be allowed to create a dystopian metaverse”.
56% offering a positive view, so start the ball rolling by creating VR experiences to promote your brand and use this data to sharpen your ads for the metaverse later.
During lockdown, plenty of virtual events took place. However, feeling the atmosphere, hearing your friends and seeing everything in 3D takes it to a whole new level. You can start thinking of how your brand can tap into this feature now, with new immersive ideas.
Almost half (44%) of Generation Z has made a purchase decision based on a recommendation from a social influencer, so seeing how influencer marketing will develop with this platform will be game-changing.
Imagine a world where technology and reality worked in tandem. Where you could see and talk to your friends on other sides of the planet as though they were sipping a coffee next to you. Where you could blend holograms of work projects with physical note-taking in real-time.
That said, there is concern that it is no longer attracting valuable younger users. According to one internal memo, teenage users of the Facebook app in the US were projected to drop 45 per cent over the next two years. The social network has gained a reputation as “Boomerbook”, a place where angry uncles and aunts row about politics and swap questionably sourced news stories.
Among other things, the evidence she presents shows Facebook acquiescing to autocratic censors and demonstrates an awareness inside the company of the possible damage done to adolescent users. Now, Haugen, working with a consortium of news organisations, has presented to the public a damning trove of internal documents that portray a company grappling with the damage done by its products.
It’s an idea with endless potential, and certainly the markets adored the announcement. After the rebrand, Facebook’s stock rose four per cent — good news for the company which lost $7 billion last month during an outage that saw Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram affected for hours.
Mr Cox told Nicholas Carlson, editor-in-chief of news publication Insider, that his own dabbling in the metaverse included hosting meetings and entertainment for staff.
Mr McNamee became a critic of Facebook as he began to see more misinformation on the platform. He said he was not convinced the metaverse would be safe in chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's hands.
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Facebook has even rebrandedits parent company operation as Meta, as part of its commitment to the metaverse.
Oculus is the virtual reality company Facebook acquired in 2014 for $2 billion.
Facebook is changing the name of its company to Meta as the company sets its sights on expanding into the nascent Metaverse, the social network has confirmed.
When asked by Recode if facial recognition would be used in the metaverse, Facebook’s VP of AI Jason Grosse did not deny it.
Having a living 3D world around you means you get the opportunity to target audiences with more personalised, immersive experiences.
The metaverse is the same. The signs for its boom are already here, with tech leaders trying to seize its potential. Ignore this vision at your own peril.
During social media’s early days, no one took this new form of interaction seriously. Companies that ignored it missed out.
Gen Z is the most responsive to the idea of the metaverse, with 51% showing interest. We’ll go through why this new platform will be so influential for them.
Facebook rebranded to “Meta”, then dropped the bomb of “the metaverse”. What does it all mean? Here’s what your brand needs to know.
Chief executive David Baszucki has for several years been outlining his vision of it as a digital place where people play, work or learn with millions of 3D experiences.
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Tech giantMeta has poured billions of dollars into building the “metaverse” already – and recently vowed to hire another 10,000 staff to work on the project.
He thinks more job opportunities could be created because people could work from different cities but all meet up virtually in the metaverse.
However, the rise of digital – excluding direct sales to Google and Meta – has created a whole raft of new players with their own language and acronyms. DSPs, SSPs, ad exchanges etc – there have been plenty of intermediary players who have done very well from the digital revolution.
My point here is that the sheer level of spend is likely to mean the creation of a whole new infrastructure dedicated to servicing the metaverse. Even if no one else developed their own metaverse concepts – and it is clear from the comments of the likes of Microsoft plus more traditional platforms that others will get in on the game – pumping so much money into creating the concept will attract plenty looking to offer their services to guide clients round the metaverse.
No one can accuse Mark Zuckerberg of having small ambitions when it comes to his plans. He announced on the recent Q3 results conference call that Meta would spend $10bn on the metaverse in 2021 and these costs will rise each year for the next several years. Additionally, as a sign of its intent, Facebook will report its metaverse and related businesses separately in a new divisional line, Facebook Reality Labs or “FRL”.
It will be a place people will be able to interact, work and create products and content in what he hopes will be a new ecosystem that creates millions of jobs for creators.
And considering there are three billion people worldwide currently using Facebook, that’s a lot of potential customers to be turned into metaverse users.
Mr Zuckerberg told investors on an earnings call earlier this week that recent media coverage had painted a “false picture” of his company, adding that he was “really proud” of the progress his staff had made.
Mr Zuckerberg explained that while Facebook was one of the most used products in the world, the name no longer reflected the true breadth of its ambitions during the company’s annual Connect conference.
Such changes – as well as the dropping of the Facebook brand more broadly – could be in recognition of the rapidly dropping reputation of the Facebook brand in recent months and years. The company has faced numerous privacy scandals and other criticism, and recent weeks have brought damaging leaks from a whistleblower who revealed deep division at Facebook.
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six times more than other methods, so imagine the advancement of education with the help of this platform.
But how much trouble is the company really in, beyond the bad press? Its market value hasn’t plummeted. Its share price is higher today than it was a year ago. Revenue grew by 35 per cent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2021 and net profits rose by 17 per cent. Wall Street seems a lot more relaxed about Haugen’s revelations than much of the commentary might lead you to believe.
Facebook’s founder has been fighting an especially heavy downpour of bad news lately. The embarrassment of the outage to services in early October was soon overshadowed by the testimony of Frances Haugen, the whistleblower accusing her former employer of doing immense social harm.
"So we're ushering in the metaverse, and we feel it needs to be a place that everyone can access, a place where people can express themselves and connect together.
Mr Cox, speaking for Meta, put forward a different view - that the metaverse idea is the next step for the internet as a whole, not just for his company.
Some of these increases will come from other areas, but metaverse investments clearly account for a significant proportion. Taking Meta’s comments at face value, it is likely to spend well over $60bn cumulatively over the next five years on realising its metaverse project. That is not a small amount of money.
It is clear this is a long-term project on Meta’s part. The company stated that it would only start generating significant returns on the metaverse in the latter part of this decade, which suggests that the next several years will see a large impact on Meta’s overall profitability.
I was initially going to write yet another article on the implications of the metaverse and what it meant. But then I thought, firstly, I would not be able to do it justice in such a short piece, and secondly, there is a potentially more interesting angle when it comes to Meta’s plans; namely the knock-on effects of Meta’s level of spending on the metaverse.
Inside the metaverse will be different apps for different purposes. One of these apps, called Horizon Workrooms, is designed for colleagues to work together.
So much so, that Facebook has recently rebranded its parent company as Meta.
Digital-only designers are also on the rise, with many new creators seeing a number of benefits to the digital elements of fashion, including sustainable production methods and aligning with the values of the ever-increasing digital natives, Gen Z.
A 150 million dollar investment into immersive training for next-generation creators was also revealed.
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However, Microsoft president Brad Smith has since downplayed the “hype” surrounding the metaverse.
$200 billion, and that’s rising. They are the builders and consumers of tomorrow’s metaverse.
65% of Gen Z have spent money on virtual items within a game, so VR has enormous potential to tap into their wants.
Young Minds survey, 87% of young people agreed that they had felt lonely or isolated during the lockdown period. With the metaverse, you would be able to interact with others as though they were right next to you, creating a world that will significantly help mental wellbeing.
The Facebook Metaverse. What is it? What does it signal for brands? We’re digging into how your brand can win in the metaverse, right now and beyond.
He acknowledged that no one company, such as Meta, would own the metaverse, pointing to Roblox as an example.
That same technology was a good alternative to video calls, he argued.
"Facebook should not be allowed to create a dystopian metaverse," he said.
The definition of the metaverse really depends on how you ask.
“And that’s why we need a system in place to police it. No single company should ever exert control - it’s simply too important for that to happen."
“Many current MR prototype systems have face, eye, body and hand tracking tech. Most have sophisticated cameras. Some even incorporate Electroencephalogram technology in order to pick up brainwave patterns. In other words everything you say, manipulate, look at, or eventhink aboutcan be monitored in MR.
Professor Reid is concerned about the vast amount of data that could be collected from the metaverse and who controls it.
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In his monthly column for VideoWeek, Ian Whittaker explains how Meta’s own investment will spark even more outside investment in the metaverse, and how this will all likely play into Meta’s hands in the long-run.
‘No one company will own and operate the metaverse. Like the internet, its key feature will be its openness and interoperability,’ wrote Clegg.
The second, in all likelihood, will be a Facebook account. This is so the company can tie your identity to a profile and scoop up all the valuable data about how you use it.
Zuckerberg says he expects the metaverse to reach a billion people within the next decade.
Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes something called the ‘metaverse’ isn’t just the future of Facebook, but also the future of the internet.
The Meta dream envisages whole companies operating in a virtual world. Many made the switch years ago—with mixed results.
The parent company will now be known as “Meta”, he said. It will also get a new logo, with a blue “M”.
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What we know is that the metaverse presents an exciting opportunity, right now.
71% of Gen Z prefer personalised experiences. This is yet another way of winning over young audiences.
Neal Stephenson first coined the word in “Snow Crash”, the science fiction novel, but the outcome of this concept is planted firmly in reality.
So let’s get you clued up on the what, why and where of the metaverse and how you can prepare.
“We can afford nothing less than transparency,” Haugen said in her testimony to Congress. “As long as Facebook is operating in the shadows and hiding its research from public scrutiny, it is unaccountable.” Haugen wants more regulatory oversight and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic seem determined to act. Last night at an event in Lisbon, she called for Zuckerberg to step down as CEO.
I can tell they are men because I can hear their voices. Visually they are avatars, disembodied from the waist up and looking a bit like Lego Friends. Back in the real world of meat, they could be anyone. They will be at desks, in beds, on sofas or perhaps just standing gormlessly in the middle of rooms, waving their arms around.
“What comes after the internet? Instead of looking at a screen, you get to be in the experiences.
Reid doesn't think the metaverse is all bad though.
He suggests that the metaverse should be a collaborative effort with a standard set for everyone to follow.
"The data this will generate will be vast…..and extremely valuable.
“And the market for that is gigantic. Whoever controls it, will basically have control over yourentirereality.
He also fears that avatars could be hacked and you could end up interacting with cyber criminals rather than people you know and trust.
“And we need a highly robust system in place to police the metaverse.
Dr David Reid, Professor of AI and Spatial Computing at Liverpool Hope University, thinks it will change our lives just like the internet did.
The immersive virtual world was recently revealed as one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's top priorities but critics are sceptical about how good it will actually be.
FACEBOOK'S metaverse poses "terrifying dangers" and needs to be policed, according to an expert.
None of the hirings will occur in the UK, where Facebook already employs around 4,000 people.
The company is investing £36 million to hire 10,000 highly skilled workers in the EU to build it.
Each person can design avatars of themselves and use hand gestures thanks to the wireless Oculus controllers that come with the VR headset.
According to Zuckerberg, Facebook has been working on this since well before the pandemic hit. But with Covid-19 accelerating our reliance on tech to communicate and work together, the idea may not be as silly as you’d first assume.
This new umbrella company will oversee not just Facebook but also WhatsApp, Instagram and, crucially, Oculus.
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