The Facebook company has changed its name to Meta as it repositions its brand from more than just a social media platform and moves into virtual reality – what Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has defined as the metaverse.
Facebook, the popular social media destination will still be called Facebook while its other social media and communications assets will also still be called Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.
This announcement comes at a time when Facebook is facing some negative press after a whistleblower claimed the company was more interested in profits than public safety.
There has also been concern Facebook has not adequately monitored and moderated hate speech and wildly inaccurate political posts on the platform.
The metaverse Mr Zuckerberg referred to will be a social, 3D virtual space which will allow users to share immersive experiences with others.
The company will invest more than $10bn into building out the metaverse.
The pandemic has shown that we can all connect and work remotely.
But Meta’s vision is giving people the opportunity to do things together they couldn’t even do in the physical world.
“I’m proud of what we’ve built so far, and I’m excited about what comes next — as we move beyond what’s possible today, beyond the constraints of screens, beyond the limits of distance and physics, and towards a future where everyone can be present with each other, create new opportunities and experience new things. It is a future that is beyond any one company and that will be made by all of us,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg
“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.
“Over time, I hope that we are seen as a metaverse company, and I want to anchor our work and identity on what we’re building toward.”
Facebook has skin on the virtual reality as the owner of the Oculus brand – the creator of virtual headsets – which it acquired some years ago.
The newly named Meta company will pivot to scale the VR ecosystem beyond the already popular games.
Areas like social and fitness are also becoming popular areas of VR as well as the ways VR can be utilised as a next generation collaborative work tool.
The VR developer community is growing and this move my Meta will help these developers build and monetise their apps and tools.
“The metaverse is the next evolution in online social technology and will help us connect in ways not yet possible today,” says Will Easton, Meta managing director, Australia and New Zealand.
“While nothing beats being together in person, recent months have highlighted how, when that’s not possible or practical, the digital world can still help us feel connected.
“The metaverse will help us get closer to feeling that in-person presence through sharing a space rather than a screen.
“Facebook isn’t going to build, own or run the metaverse on its own, we will be collaborating at every stage with policymakers, experts and industry partners.
“There are already a wealth of Australian companies and creators working in this space, including fashion designers, gaming and VR experience creators, academics and marketers experimenting with new immersive formats.
Australia has an opportunity to be on the forefront of this technology even at this early stage of its development.”
Here are the areas of the metaverse where Meta will be working:
SOCIAL VR
– Introducing Horizon Home: Soon when you join an Oculus Party, you’ll be able to invite your friends into a new social version of your Home where they’ll be embodied as their avatars. You’ll be able to spend time together with friends, co-watch videos together, and launch games and apps together
– Messenger calling in VR: Soon you’ll be able to communicate with your friends across all your apps and devices — including Portal — with Messenger calling in VR coming later this year. From anywhere in VR, you’ll be able to invite your Facebook friends to join a Messenger call and eventually spend time together or travel to VR destinations.
FITNESS
– New fitness offerings on Oculus: Supernatural boxing, new FitXR fitness studios and Player 22 by Rezzil, which is currently used by pro athletes, is adding guided and hand tracked bodyweight exercises.
– Active Pack for Quest 2: We’re making a fitness accessories pack that makes Quest 2 more comfortable, with controller grips for when things get intense, and a facial interface that you can wipe the sweat off, making your sessions more comfortable. That’s coming next year.
VR FOR WORK
– Quest for Business, including Work Accounts support on Quest 2: The new business offering will bring work capabilities into consumer Quest devices, including the ability to log into Quest 2 with a Work Account instead of a personal Facebook account. It will also bring businesses the tools they need, like account management, IDP & SSO integration, Mobile Device Management and more. Beginning to test this year; fully available in 2023.
– 2D apps coming to Quest in Horizon Home: We will announce that services like Slack, Dropbox, Facebook and Instagram, and many more will soon work in VR as 2D panel apps in Horizon Home — so you can multitask, cross things off your to-do list between gaming sessions, and stay connected while in VR. This starts bringing some of your favourite 2D internet services into the metaverse. You’ll see the first 2D apps in the Store today, including Facebook, Instagram, Smartsheet, and Spike. More apps will follow soon, like Dropbox,Monday.com, MURAL, My5 (UK), PlutoTV, and Slack – all built using the Progressive Web App industry standard.
– New personal workspace environment in Horizon Home: A place to focus and work using the new suite of 2D panel apps, or just check a few things off your to-do list.
– Workrooms customisation: For Horizon Workrooms, Meta is working on launching the capability to customize your Workroom with your company logo, posters, or designs.
OCULUS DEVELOPERS
– Presence Platform: Meta will unveil Presence Platform, a broad range of machine perception and AI capabilities that will enable developers to build mixed reality experiences on the Quest platform. A realistic sense of presence will be key to feeling connected in the Metaverse, and Presence Platform’s capabilities deliver on this promise with things like environmental understanding, content placement and persistence, voice interaction, and standardised hand interactions. Presence Platform consists of three offerings we’re announcing today: Insight SDK for developing mixed reality experiences, Interaction SDK to make it easier to add hand interactions to apps and Voice SDK to make voice input a part of the experiences they build.
– PWA SDK: Meta is rolling out the tools to allow any developer to start creating and testing PWA apps on Quest devices. In the near future developers will be able to ship their PWAs to App Lab. PWA developers will be able to submit app packages to Oculus, and their apps will show up in either the Oculus Store or App Lab. PWA apps stay up to date without requiring app package updates since they display live content from the developers’ site. This will allow developers to transform the 2D experience of their websites into an app on Oculus. PWAs in App Lab can also use WebXR.
– Avatars 2.0 SDK: Earlier this year Meta announced an overhauled version of Avatars in VR. We’re excited to share that the SDK will be made available in December.
– Cloud Backup: Meta will be launching a new Cloud Backup system later this year, allowing users to back up their device’s app data, like game progress or settings, so they can easily pick up where they left off in a game. It works at the filesystem level, with no coding required.
– Multiplayer: Later this year, Meta will be adding the following Multiplayer capabilities: a direct invite API that lets you send invites directly from your own UX, a new channel into your app from our discovery surfaces called Ask to Join (existing integrated apps get this for free), ways to more easily friend other users and discovery opportunities in VR and 2D. We also built a new multiplayer sample called SharedSpaces to help developers get started with the new social platform APIs. Available for Unity and Unreal 4.
Augmented reality is also part of Meta’s plans for the future with the goal of creating fully featured AR glasses.
A few weeks ago, Facebook partnered with Ray-Ban to create the Ray-Ban Stories glasses which have integrated cameras to record video from your point of view.
That experience could be enriched in the future with other content, data and information which can be seen in real time.
