The metaverse, a new way to use the internet.
A company under attack could launch a media offensive at any moment. On Facebook, it came Monday. The US tech company, which defends itself against regulators, lawmakers and whistleblowers, wants to hand out jobs in Europe.
A distraction from the almost daily news of fines from Brussels and hearings in Washington. Over the next five years, according to Facebook, 10,000 new highly skilled workers will be needed for the ‘metaverse’.
This buzzword has been around for a while. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg regularly mentions it in blogs and interviews. At the end of July, he announced a new product team to turn the social media company into a ‘metaverse company’. The new jobs plan, according to Facebook’s press release, “puts Europeans at the center of our plans to build the metaverse.”
What is metaverse?
But what is metaverse? To whom it seems like an echo from science fiction literature: that’s right. The term first appeared in Snow Crash, a 1993 novel by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. In a fictional computer world (the metaverse), puppets (avatars) are controlled by real people. The avatars become addicted to snow crash, a drug that is also a computer virus and even infects real people.
The book gains cult status and inspires ‘real’ metaverses.
The best known is the American Second Life. This virtual world, launched in 2003, has quickly become such hype that companies are even advertising in it. After ten years it is still stuck at a million monthly users. Hollywood also dives into the metaverse. The Matrix, a film cycle, revolves around a virtual world that is indistinguishable from the real one.
Special glasses
The seriousness of Facebook’s metaverse was apparent on Sept. 22 when chief technology officer (CTO) Mike Schroepfer left. The tech boss appeared to be the victim of disclosures by a whistleblower.
The company is said to be doing far too little to fight fake news and hate messages. Both the US Senate and the British and European parliaments want to speak to whistleblower Frances Haugen. Schroepfer seems like a peace offering.
But new CTO Andrew Bosworth will be given a specific task. He must, according to Zuckerberg in a blog, lay the ‘foundation’ for Facebook’s metaverse. His team is even expanding.
This team has been developing special glasses for years. They project extra information into the spectacle lens (augmented reality or AR), or they close off the outside world and project a complete fake world (virtual reality or VR).
Facebook has been investing in AR and VR technology since 2014, when it bought VR developer Oculus for $2 billion. A large part of the innovation budget of more than $18 billion goes to the so-called Facebook Reality Labs, which, according to industry analysts, already has one-sixth of Facebook’s almost 60,000 employees.
Zuckerberg firmly believes in these glasses. They will become an important link between humans and computers, he told analysts. The game world already uses them, but according to Zuckerberg, they are also suitable for video meetings, online shopping, attending concerts, or just “hanging out” in a virtual world.
The technology is not intended to use even more internet, the CEO says in an interview with tech magazine The Verge. With the glasses, the internet will feel more ‘natural’. The metaverse isn’t an extra internet, it’s another way to use the internet with glasses from Facebook.
Image Credit: Getty
You were reading: Why Facebook is under the spell of Metaverse