Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he plans to transform the social media platform into a “Metaverse” in the next five years
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently said that he wants the social media giant to become an ‘online Metaverse’. It’s “an embodied internet where instead of just viewing content, you are in it,” he said.
The Facebook CEO told The Verge people shouldn’t live through “small, glowing rectangles.”
“That’s not really how people are made to interact,” he added. “That’s not how we process things.”
What is the Metaverse?
A metaverse is an digital world where you can game, work and communicate virtually, usually through a VR headset
“You feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness,” he said.
Zuckerberg says that Facebook is also working on the ‘Infinite Office’ – a feature that will allow users to design a workplace using VR.
“In the future, instead of just doing this over a phone call, you’ll be able to sit as a hologram on my couch, or I’ll be able to sit as a hologram on your couch, and it’ll actually feel like we’re in the same place, even if we’re in different states or hundreds of miles apart,” he said. “I think that is really powerful.”
Facebook invests in Oculus, betting on the future of VR
Facebook has continued to invest in VR products, recently spending over $2 billion on Oculus. This comes two years after Oculus launched its invitation-only Facebook Horizon. Using the software, users can use a headset to chat in a virtual space with an avatar.
Although Zuckerberg admitted the current VR headsets are “a bit clunky”, he promised improvements are in the works.
He says Facebook’s Metaverse will be “accessible across… different computing platforms” including VR, AR, PC, mobile devices and games consoles.
Natasha is an Associate Producer at ticker NEWS with a Bachelor of arts from Monash University. She has previously worked at Sky News Australia and Monash University as an Online Content Producer.
The recent backlash against Musk’s proposed tweet cap could prove to be the perfect time to launch the competitor
Meta Platforms, the company behind Facebook, plans to launch a microblogging app called Threads on Thursday, to operate as a direct competitor to Twitter. The launch comes just days after Twitter boss Elon Musk attracted criticism by announcing limits to how many posts users could read on the platform.
Threads will allow users to directly port their followers from Instagram, another app owned by the company, and to keep the same username. This feature will allow users to supercharge the often slow process of building a following on the new site.
While other apps such as Mastodon and Blue Sky have failed to present much of a challenge to Twitter, Threads is launching after a period of intense criticism and scepticism of Twitter, which followed Musk’s US$44 billion purchase of the platform in 2022.
Musk has made significant staffing cuts in areas like content moderation which has caused a rift with advertisers. He has also implemented several elements such as an US$8 per month account verification system which has proved unpopular with users.
Instagram boasts roughly 2.3 billion users compared to Twitter’s almost 400 million, which poses a significant user advantage from which to draw from.