Facebook renamed Meta, the ultimate combination of virtual and reality

Author: Zhou Ri

Facebook's optimism about the Metaverse exceeds imagination.

On October 29, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially announced at the Facebook Connect developer conference held on Wednesday that the company would be renamed "Meta," and that the company's stock ticker would change from "FB" to "MVRS" starting December 1.

Meta is a prefix for Metaverse, representing Facebook's ambitions in the Metaverse space. The name "Facebook," which has been used since the company's establishment in 2004, has become history. After 17 years, this social platform with over 2 billion users is going all in on the Metaverse.

At Thursday's Facebook Connect event, he elaborated on his vision for the Metaverse, believing it to be key to attracting younger users. "We have moved from desktop to web to mobile, from text to photos to videos, but that is not the end. The next platform and medium will be a more immersive and concrete internet where you can experience it, not just look at it. We call it the Metaverse."

Undoubtedly, the Metaverse is one of the hottest trends of 2021, but when we compare various Metaverses, we find significant differences among them. The Metaverse of the Crypto world, the traditional internet's Metaverse, the hardware-first Metaverse, and the IP cluster Metaverse all have different focuses and concepts. Looking back at Facebook, it may have found a relatively neutral path that integrates various characteristics of the Metaverse.

The visual experience created by leading hardware, along with a global Stablecoin that is expected to be used in physical locations. The composition of Facebook's Metaverse is far more complex than that of other internet giants. Facebook's ambition is to build a new world encompassing social interaction, life, entertainment, and even economic systems and currencies.

Before the Metaverse was born, it started with hardware

When tracing back to Facebook and the Metaverse's past, one might recall the announcement made by Zuckerberg at the end of June this year regarding Facebook's new goal: "Today, in people's eyes, we are primarily a social media company. In the future, we will effectively transform into a Metaverse company."

With several internet giants rushing into the field, the term "Metaverse," which was born in the last century, has become a buzzword in the tech industry. The rapid rise of "Metaverse" may lead people to mistakenly believe that current giants are competing to "lay out early," while in fact, Facebook's layout for the Metaverse began many years ago—despite the concept being almost unknown at that time.

In 2014, Facebook acquired the virtual device manufacturer Oculus, known as the "gateway to the Metaverse," for $2.3 billion. The "VR" track began to show its potential, and the following year, the VR industry was considered to be on the "eve of explosion." In 2015, it was referred to as the "Year of VR," with tremendous expectations from entrepreneurs, VCs, tech giants, and investment banks for this industry, which was dubbed the "next generation internet gateway."

The subsequent story is well-known. It turned out that the market had unrealistic and overly high expectations for this industry, and after a brief hype, the VR winter arrived. Even today, we still use smartphones as the largest internet gateway. Regardless of how the technical routes of VR/AR/MR have fluctuated, the question "When will consumer-grade VR/AR/MR devices experience an explosion?" remains a soul-searching inquiry for everyone in the industry.

The acquisition of Oculus seven years ago may be Facebook's greatest first-mover advantage in the Metaverse. Years have passed, and a series of competing products, including Google Daydream, have long been discontinued. Oculus has built a solid advantage, trying many directions and taking many detours from high-end PC VR to entry-level all-in-one headsets, finally breaking through in September 2020 with the Oculus Quest 2. In March of this year, Facebook announced that Quest 2 sales exceeded the total of all previous Quest series. The active user count for the Quest series surpassed 10 million, dominating the VR device market with over half of the market share.

Facebook founder Zuckerberg believes that the Metaverse is an upgraded version of the mobile internet, a social platform with strong immersion created using virtual reality technology and dedicated hardware devices. From a hardware reserve perspective, Facebook has the most sufficient foundation to build the Metaverse. But how is this Facebook version of the Metaverse different from others?

Facebook's Metaverse

In most introductions to the Metaverse, "Ready Player One" has always been the representative work of Metaverse imagination, where people envision a completely virtual or parallel world to reality.

However, Facebook does not want to create "Ready Player One." What Facebook aims to do is the ultimate combination of virtual and reality.

Perhaps we can see Facebook's vision of the Metaverse through the video by digital blogger "Dianwan Technology AK," explaining Facebook's virtual social platform Horizon Workrooms and Oculus Quest 2.

This is a Mixed Reality that combines AR and VR, allowing users to enter the virtual world of Horizon Workrooms by wearing the Oculus Quest 2 device. In Horizon, real objects can be mapped into virtual space, such as real object models existing in the system library, and there will be a 1:1 adaptation between virtual and real spaces.

Taking a meeting scenario as an example, if Zoom brings together people in a two-dimensional space, Facebook offers a brand new three-dimensional meeting experience.

Community members can simultaneously appear in the same virtual space from thousands of miles away. Thanks to the four black-and-white wide-angle cameras equipped on the Quest 2, users' gestures in the real world can be captured, making all actions in the virtual space more aligned with reality.

Your movements, hand gestures while speaking, and eyebrow movements in reality can all be fully mirrored in the virtual space, and physical contact in the virtual space can also be felt in reality. Your keyboard and monitor can seamlessly map into the virtual world; typing on a real keyboard allows you to see it on the virtual screen. Notifications from WeChat and email can also appear in the virtual space right in front of you.

At this year's Facebook Connect conference, Facebook also launched the new device Project Cambria and updates for development within the Metaverse. All experiences seem to be more realistic.

Seamlessly switching between virtual and reality without removing the headset is what Facebook wants to achieve in the Metaverse.

What Zuckerberg wants to build is far more than just a "Metaverse company"

Before Facebook went "All In" on the Metaverse, cryptocurrency was considered the track that Facebook was betting on, with its representative being the globally sensational Stablecoin Libra, now renamed Diem.

As early as 2017, Facebook had already begun its related plans in the Blockchain field, but it was not disclosed to the public at that time. In May 2019, news of Facebook planning to launch a Crypto was confirmed, referred to at that time as "GlobalCoin" or "Facebook Coin." In June, this plan was officially announced, and the project was named Libra, with the Libra Foundation's members being a "super team," covering giants in the internet, finance, retail, and other fields, including eBay, Mastercard, and Visa.

In the initial vision, this Stablecoin was not just pegged to the US dollar but to a basket of fiat currencies. Its team wrote in the white paper, "Libra is a global currency based on Blockchain, backed by real assets, and governed by an independent association. To avoid price fluctuations caused by the volatility of the underlying assets, Libra is not 'tied' to a single currency, and the chosen reserve assets include not only reputable cash but also government currency securities."

With the backing of Facebook's over 2 billion users, this grand plan aimed to create not just an existing dollar Stablecoin but a new world currency. However, Libra soon faced pressure from regulators around the world. Under regulatory pressure, neither Libra nor its successor Diem has officially launched to date.

In the long run, after obtaining regulatory approval, Diem is likely to be integrated into Facebook's Metaverse, becoming part of the infrastructure alongside Facebook's digital wallet Novi. Facebook's blockchain head Marcus has publicly stated, "I want to clarify that our support for Diem has not changed. We intend to launch Novi alongside Diem once we receive regulatory approval. We care about cross-chain, and we want to do it well."

In Facebook's view, the Metaverse is certainly not something that can be achieved overnight. They have said, "The Metaverse is a vision that spans many companies and even the entire tech industry. You can think of it as the successor to the mobile internet. If we do it well enough, I believe that in the next five years or so, we will effectively transition from being seen primarily as a social media company to a Metaverse company."

Just from Oculus Quest 2 and Horizon, these two items have already been praised by many as the best tech products of the past decade, with a level of amazement that seems to rival the iPhone of 2007 and today's Tesla. If we add the effect of cryptocurrency stablecoins, it is unimaginable how high Facebook's Metaverse will elevate our future social interactions.