California, USA – In line with the company’s vision in bringing the metaverse into life, tech conglomerate Facebook has announced the company’s new name called ‘Meta’ during its recently-concluded Connect 2021 conference last 28 October, where they laid out plans on the vision of the metaverse as the successor to the mobile internet.
Prior to the company name change, Facebook had already revealed interests in developing metaverse-related endeavors, such as their recent US$50m investment in research programs that will explore how to develop the digital metaverse responsibly.
In a company statement, they noted that the metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world. They also added that it will let audiences share immersive experiences with other people even when not being together — and do things together you couldn’t do in the physical world.
“The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build,” Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, now Meta, said in an online letter posted on Facebook.
He added, “The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology. That is why we are focused on building this.”
Zuckerberg further added that their role in this metaverse journey is to accelerate the development of the fundamental technologies, social platforms, and creative tools to bring the metaverse to life, and to weave these technologies through our social media apps.
“The metaverse will not be created by one company. It will be built by creators and developers making new experiences and digital items that are interoperable and unlock a massively larger creative economy than the one constrained by today’s platforms and their policies. We believe the metaverse can enable better social experiences than anything that exists today, and we will dedicate our energy to helping achieve its potential,” he stated.
As part of the ‘Meta’ announcement, the company has also announced new tools to help people build for the metaverse, including Presence Platform, which will enable new mixed reality experiences on Quest 2, and a US$150m investment in immersive learning to train the next generation of creators.