Being primarily a social media company up until yesterday, it also wants to see the metaverse become the space in which we connect with one other. ![]() And a new fitness pack coming to Quest 2 aims to fix the problem of VR fitness being a sweaty, clunky business.Ī $150m investment to support creators of immersive VR education was also announced, as Meta’s grand ambition is to break AR and VR experiences out of gaming and apply mixed reality to settings such as the workplace or learning environments. Popular gaming title Grand Theft Auto is being developed for Quest 2, the latest VR gaming system from Oculus. There were some actual product announcements, though. Apparently, Zuckerberg hopes to attract the next generation to a version of the internet that resembles the hollow fantasy of a Web 1.0 teenager. The bulky, face-hugging hardware required to enter the metaverse was most conspicuous in its absence. The pre-recorded, partially animated and heavily scripted presentation relied heavily on a fiction of mixed reality where bodied human beings interact in digital spaces. Very little about Zuckerberg’s Connect keynote was real. ‘It’s unsettling to be invited by Zuckerberg to join him in an unreal world he controls but can’t moderate’ But the naive vision of this concept presented by Zuckerberg just looked like a childish fantasy. At the time, this meant Instagram’s Reels and other video-based features would see more prominence on the company’s social media apps, in order to level up to chief competitor TikTok.Įven then, it was well known that Facebook was preparing a rebrand to reflect its focus on the metaverse, which itself could prove attractive to young, gaming-obsessed digital natives. Facing increasing competition for younger users, Zuckerberg said his company would now treat this audience as its “north star”. The last earnings call with Facebook as the umbrella name for the company’s family of brands also addressed one of its biggest challenges. ![]() On the earnings call, the investment in building the metaverse was earmarked at $10bn for 2021 alone, with more to come in the next several years. Prior to this, the company announced that it will hire 10,000 people in the EU to work on its metaverse project. In its latest earnings report earlier this week, the company then known as Facebook revealed that the Reality Labs segment would become its own entity with its own financial reporting for the coming quarter. Going all in on this metaverse vision, Zuckerberg is now chair and CEO of Meta, the new name of what is now the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, the Oculus family of VR products, and Reality Labs, its R&D business focused on AR and VR. “The metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet,” said Mark Zuckerberg in the opening salvo of his Connect keynote on Thursday (28 October). The company formerly known as Facebook is betting its future on the metaverse, an unproven unreality.
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