On Zuckerberg's Meta, the Metaverse and More
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg announced the renaming of Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms Inc. and said:
“The next [technology] platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build.
“You will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, at a concert with friends, or in your parents’ living room to catch up … You’ll be able to spend more time on what matters to you, cut down time in traffic, and reduce your carbon footprint.
“Privacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one. So do open standards and interoperability. This will require not just novel technical work — like supporting crypto and NFT projects in the community — but also new forms of governance.
“Over time, I hope we are seen as a metaverse company, and I want to anchor our work and our identity on what we’re building towards … To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I’m proud to share that our company is now Meta … From now on, we will be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first."
Separately, author Neal Stephenson popularized the Metaverse concept in his 1992 novel Snowcrash. The following are comments from his 2016 Financial Times interview.
“I would be nervous about adopting a top-down kind of approach [to build a Metaverse], where there is this gigantic uber-concept that is being imposed on this world. That’s a thing you can get away with when you’re writing a novel. But when you’re building something, it’s a lot more productive to be bottom-up and look for small things that work, and then see if those can be assembled into bigger things.
“There are some [system design] questions that I didn’t even know about 25 years ago … The whole question of tracking, knowing which direction someone is looking in and responding to that information …. it’s a pretty hard problem to solve, especially when it needs to happen fast and accurately and when a lot of other things are happening too … A lot of these things are converging on a timeline that is exciting."
OUR TAKE
As pundits suggest that Zuckerberg’s metaverse pivot is to divert attention from his social media challenges, he has been making VR-focused investments for several years.
The virtual reality market and metaverse ecosystems will continue to expand - addressing business and consumer needs in areas including medical therapy, education, gaming/e-sports; entertainment/gaming data visualization and more.
This class of technology can provide many positive benefits to users; however, its power may also lead to new types of addictive behavior.
Stephenson rightly points out that successful metaverse solutions will require more computing power, along with better development tools and new approaches to application design. The opportunity is significant – the path forward remains less clear.