The online network Facebook will continue to be called Facebook – but the umbrella company, which also includes Instagram, now wants to operate under the name Meta.
The Facebook group is giving itself a new name. The Meta umbrella brand will in future be available via services such as Facebook or Instagram, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday.
With the new name, Zuckerberg wants to direct the focus to the new virtual world “Metaverse”, in which he sees the future of digital communication and also of his company.
He also wants to use it to lead the group more strongly out of the shadow of its original and so far most important platform Facebook. In addition to Instagram, the company group also includes the WhatsApp and Messenger chat apps. These individual services will keep their names.
“Today we are seen as a social media company, but at the core we are a company that connects people,” said Zuckerberg. The name Facebook was no longer able to reflect the entire range of products offered by the group.
Physical and digital worlds should come together
According to the presentation of the 37-year-old Facebook founder, physical and digital worlds are to come together in the “Metaverse”. On the one hand, Zuckerberg relies on virtual reality (VR), in which users can immerse themselves in digital worlds with special glasses on their heads. The Facebook group bought the VR company Oculus, a pioneer in glasses for displaying virtual reality, seven years ago. The brand name Oculus is now being phased out. The current VR glasses will be called Meta Quest instead of Oculus Quest.
The Facebook founder also sees so-called augmented reality (AR) as a “metaverse” component, in which digital content is shown in the real environment for the viewer on displays or with the help of projector glasses.
“We believe that the” Metaverse “will be the successor to the mobile Internet,” emphasized Zuckerberg. In the future, everything that has to do with the “Metaverse” will have priority over Facebook. The group is expanding its virtual “Metaverse” worlds under the name “Horizon”.
Zuckerberg explains his “Metaverse” concept
At the in-house developer conference Connect, Zuckerberg gave the most detailed description of his “Metaverse” concept to date. It will be a virtual world that you can immerse yourself in even more deeply, right down to the facial expressions of the people around you. “Instead of looking at a screen, you will be right in the middle of these experiences.”
The feeling of being there is the decisive feature of the «Metaverse», he emphasized. “If I send my parents a video of my children, they will feel that they are with us.” At first it remained unclear which technical means would be used to implement this presence effect beyond the VR headsets.
The Facebook founder announced “Horizon Home”, a new, “more social” home for Oculus users. However, the area looks very similar to the start area that VR glasses users already find today. What is new is that users can use rooms and virtual objects across the boundaries of individual games or events.
Physical objects will be able to be scanned so that they are also present in the “Metaverse”, said the Facebook founder. At the same time, they will be able to be projected as holograms anywhere in the real world. In the next five to ten years, much of it will be part of everyday life, emphasized Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg already said that his company hopes to have one billion users in the “Metaverse” by 2030 – and several hundred million dollars in business. This year alone, Facebook is spending ten billion dollars in development work.
Vision is well received on the stock market
Zuckerberg’s vision was well received on the stock exchange. After the presentation, the Facebook share went out of trading with a plus of around 1.5 percent. The stock exchange abbreviation for the share is to be changed from “FB” to “MVRS” on December 1, based on the “Metaverse”.
Facebook also emphasized that the announcement did not change anything in the way the company handles data. The group has come under heavy pressure in recent weeks from internal documents that were made public by a former employee. Frances Haugen appears as a whistleblower and accuses Facebook of putting profits above the well-being of its users.
Facebook isn’t the first Silicon Valley corporation to change its company name to signal that the company’s direction has expanded. In 2015, for example, Google put a new holding company called Alphabet over the group. The Internet company wanted to signal that it not only operates a search engine and a cloud business, but also has ambitions for driverless cars, health solutions and other high-tech areas. However, almost all of Alphabet’s revenues are still generated by Google, and the bottom line is that the other companies are only posting losses. Google boss Sundar Pichai is now also at the top of the alphabet.
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