Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at the company’s annual Connect conference that its umbrella company will have a new name, although the social media service will retain its name.
“I am proud to announce that, starting today, our company is now Meta,” he said. “Our mission remains the same … our apps and our brands, they’re not changing either,” he promised.
The new incarnation will feature, among other things, shared online spaces inhabited by digital avatars, virtual-reality glasses and an e-commerce platform.
“Over time I hope our company will be seen as a metaverse company,” Zuckerberg said. “We’ve gone from desktop to web to phones, from text to photos to video, but this isn’t the end of the line.
“The next platform and medium will be even more immersive and embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it, and we call this the metaverse,” he explained.
This brave new virtual world does not come without its ancillary costs, however: access will require a range of new devices, including headsets and glasses, in addition to the already-existing PCs and smartphones.
The company has already begun, with the release last year of a beta version of Horizon, a social platform for the metaverse. Facebook is creating a marketplace for Horizon where creators can sell and share digital items, he said, as well as office-related features for the platform.
The company’s Facebook Reality Labs – which includes augmented-reality and virtual reality products and services – will become a separate reporting unit with an initial budget of $10 billion.
“I know some people will say this is not a time to focus on the future,” Zuckerberg acknowledged, but insisted it is important to keep moving forward, even if mistakes are made on the “long road” ahead.
“We want to serve as many people as possible,” he said. “That’s the approach that we want to take to help build the metaverse, too.”