The umbrella company with services such as Facebook and Instagram will in future be called META, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday. With the new name, Zuckerberg wants to direct the focus to the new virtual environment “Metaverse”, in which he sees the future of digital communication – and also of his company.
He also wants to use it to lead the group more strongly out of the shadow of its original and so far most important platform, Facebook. In addition to Instagram, the company group also includes the WhatsApp and Messenger chat apps.
The plans were well received by the stock market.
“Today we are seen as a social media company, but at heart we are a company that connects people,” said Zuckerberg. The name Facebook was no longer able to reflect the entire range of products offered by the group.
According to the presentation of the 37-year-old Facebook founder, physical and digital worlds are to come together in the “Metaverse”. On the one hand, Zuckerberg relies on virtual reality (VR), in which users can immerse themselves in digital worlds with special glasses on their heads. The VR company Oculus also belongs to the Facebook group.
The Facebook founder also sees so-called augmented reality (AR) as a “metaverse” component, in which digital content is shown in the real environment for the viewer on displays or with the help of projector glasses.
“We believe that the” Metaverse “will be the successor to the mobile Internet,” emphasized Zuckerberg. Facebook is expanding its virtual “Metaverse” worlds under the name Horizon.
At the in-house developer conference Connect, Zuckerberg gave the most detailed description of his “Metaverse” concept to date. It will be a virtual world that you can immerse yourself in even more deeply, right down to the facial expressions of the people around you. “Instead of looking at a screen, you will be right in the middle of these experiences.” The feeling of being there is the decisive characteristic of the “Metaverse”, he emphasized. “If I send a video of my children to my parents, they will feel like they are with us.” At first it remained unclear which technical means beyond the VR headsets should be used to implement this presence effect.
With “Horizon Home”, the Facebook founder announced a new, more “social” home for Oculus users. However, the area looks very similar to the start area that VR glasses users already find today. What is new is that users can use rooms and virtual objects beyond the boundaries of individual games or events.
Physical objects will be able to be scanned so that they are also present in the “Metaverse”, said the Facebook founder. At the same time, they will be able to be projected into the real world as holograms. Much of this will be part of everyday life in the next five to ten years, emphasized Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg said that his company hopes to have a billion users in the “Metaverse” by 2030 – and several hundred million dollars in business.
In the past few weeks, Facebook has come under heavy pressure from internal documents that were made public by a former employee. Frances Haugen appears as a whistleblower and accuses Facebook of putting profits above the well-being of its users.
Facebook isn’t the first Silicon Valley corporation to change its company name to signal that the company’s direction has expanded. In 2015, for example, Google put a new holding company called Alphabet over the group. The Internet company wanted to signal that it not only operates a search engine and a cloud business, but also has ambitions for driverless cars, health solutions and other high-tech areas. However, almost all of Alphabet’s revenue is still generated by Google, and the other companies only post losses on the bottom line. Google boss Sundar Pichai is now also at the top of the alphabet.
After a long downturn since the record high in early September, Facebook shares began to recover late on Thursday. After it became known that the group would in future be called META, investors suddenly took the initiative. The Facebook share has meanwhile increased 3.70 percent on the NASDAQ to 323.80 US dollars. In the early trading period it had once again tended to be lighter, reaching its lowest level in five months at $ 308.11.
From the $ 384 record high, Facebook shares had plummeted by almost 20 percent to the daily low.
MENLO PARK (dpa-AFX)
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