Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he plans to launch a new product team which will work on the “metaverse”, a digital world where users can communicate in a virtual environment and move between different devices.
The new product team is to form part of Facebook’s new virtual reality arm, with the vision to eventually enable users of the social network to immerse themselves in content rather than simply view it through a screen.
Zuckerberg told The Verge: “You can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are in it.”
The Facebook founder has already invested into developing Virtual Reality headsets, AR glasses and wristband technologies, as well as acquiring numerous Virtual Reality Gaming studios, including BigBox VR, as part of its push toward the metaverse. Facebook Horizon, the social network’s own VR world, launched in 2019.
According to a report from The Verge in March 2021, Facebook currently has around 10,000 employees working on its Reality Labs VR division, with Zuckerberg adamant that the metaverse could eventually succeed the internet as we know it.
Posting on Facebook, Zuckerberg said: “I believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet and creating this product group is the next step in our journey to help build it.”
He also told The Verge that individuals should not be expected to live and interact through “small, glowing rectangles.”
Zuckerberg added: “That’s not really how people are made to interact. A lot of the meetings that we have today, you’re looking at a grid of faces on a screen. That’s not how we process things either.
“If we do this well, I think over the next five years or so we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”
Kevin M Thomson, founder of The WoWW! Business is one of the brains behind Flexidesk Online, a new hybrid solution designed to improve connectivity and fuel wellbeing in the post-pandemic world. While pleased to hear about Facebook’s innovations in VR connectivity and the metaverse, he was disappointed not to see more of a focus on wellbeing when exploring the ability to connect people with their peers from afar, within immersive experiences.
Kevin said: “I think Facebook’s foray into the metaverse is truly great news, especially for us a start-up looking to create ‘green hybrid working and wellbeing’ through immersive hybrid hubs and hublets. Unfortunately, there was nothing in Facebook’s announcement about the pandemic, and the key issues of wellbeing through connecting and a green way of hybrid working.
“Further to this, their proposed route to connection is that you connect via an avatar, and the million micro expressions and thoughts and feelings we convey as real people can then be lost through what I call ‘virtual unreality.’”
In Kevin’s view, while integrated visual communication platforms have their place in the future of social care and various other industries, it is key to remember that business and leadership are built on human interaction.
“While the gamification of simply ‘meeting-up’ may create a better user experience than a six-inch screen, the solution I feel is to the wrong problem of virtual experience over real engagement”.
