Zuckerberg wants to evolve internet into a metaverse virtual world

MARK Zuckerberg wants to reinvent Facebook. He has been telling analysts that he wants the company to lead the way to a completely different internet.

“In the coming years, people will transition from seeing us primarily as a social media company to seeing us as a metaverse company … In many ways the metaverse is the ultimate expression of social technology,” he said.

So what does the Facebook chief executive mean by “metaverse company”? The term “metaverse” is used to describe the vision whereby the internet will evolve into a virtual world.

The idea was first conceptualised in 1992 by the American novelist Neal Stephenson in his science fiction classic, Snow Crash. It foresees the internet as a 3D virtual living space, where individuals dip in and out, interacting with one another in real time.

In his quest to turn Facebook into a metaverse company, Zuckerberg is seeking to build a system where people move between virtual reality (VR), AR and even 2D devices, using realistic avatars of themselves. Here they will work, socialise, share things and have other experiences, while still probably using the internet for some tasks such as searches, similar to how we use it now.

Owning not only the Facebook platform but also Whatsapp, Instagram and VR headset maker Oculus gives Zuckerberg a big head start in making this a reality. Collectively, these brands give Facebook an unbeatable number of customer relationships, and all the important knowledge for creating a desirable virtual world: how people behave online, their personalities, likes and dislikes, gait, eye movement and even emotional states.

To help build the metaverse, Facebook’s engineers will have to succeed at immersive realism. Imagine a computer game with 2.9 billion avatars and the artificial intelligence that harvests all known information on them. The company has created a division called Reality Labs, whose researchers are working on creating the defining quality of the metaverse, namely “presence” – the feeling of being in a space with others. This team is heavily staffed by people with gaming backgrounds.

Facebook is also ploughing money “intetolepsoofrttwinagr”e tionteonaabnloetahcetrivpitliaecseliksoe that it seems as if you are really there, as well as physical kit like AR glasses and more advanced VR headsets.

Zuckerberg expects Facebook to have made this transition within the next five years, and for devices like headsets and AR glasses to be ready for heavy daily mainstream use by the end of the decade.

To succeed, Facebook is going to have to make its VR offering interoperable with metaverse systems being created by other companies online. It is also going to have to be scaleable, so that it can cope seamlessly with more and more people becoming part of it.

Those are costly propositions to integrate the technology. Zuckerberg believes Facebook will make money from the sale of virtual goods and experiences. Will we be paying for the stylish avatar clothes, for example? Or to see the latest movie in a virtual cinema?

And in this new world we will probably be interacting with one another even more than we do already. This points to even more revenue opportunities for the gatekeeper.

Creating a virtual world for users to interact is not just a fancy vision, it is a commercial necessity. Zuckerberg created the first social media global platform. Now, in virtual reality, he’s trying to pull off the same trick again.