Facebook & Metaverse: Everything you Need to Know

September 30, 2021

By the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg shared with his employees an ambitious initiative that he was going to drive his company towards ‘Metaverse.’ According to him, the future of Facebook would go far beyond building a set of connected social apps and build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse.

What is Metaverse?

If you have read the science fiction novel Snow Crash, understanding metaverse will be easy for you. But for those who haven’t read it, I’ll explain it in simple words. Metaverse is a virtual online space where we use realistic avatars to meet and hang out with people, play games, attend concerts, games, etc., through a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality. Metaverse has its roots in science fiction and is more like a social sphere and are derivatives or copies of real-world.

In an interview with Casey Newton from The Verge, Zuckerberg discusses a lot about metaverse and says, “I think a lot of people, when they think about the metaverse, they think about just virtual reality — which I think is going to be an important part of that. But the metaverse isn’t just virtual reality. It’s going to be accessible across all of our different computing platforms; VR and AR, PC, and mobile devices, and game consoles. A lot of people also think about the metaverse as primarily something that’s about gaming. And I think entertainment is going to be a big part of it, but I don’t think that this is just gaming. I think that this is a persistent, synchronous environment where we can be together, which is probably going to resemble some kind of a hybrid between the social platforms that we see today, but an environment where you’re embodied in it.”

Why Metaverse Matters?

Facebook is investing $50 million to build metaverse in an inclusive and empowering manner and aims to bring this to reality over the next couple of years. If Metaverse becomes what we think it becomes, then it is extremely important who build it as it will shape the future of the economy and society. And by that time, as the tech billionaire hopes, people will start to see Facebook as a metaverse company and not primarily as a social media company.