Facebook's optimism about the metaverse is beyond imagination.
On October 29, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially announced at the Facebook Connect developer conference held on Wednesday that the company's name will be changed to "Meta" and the company's stock code will change from 12 to 12. Changed from "FB" to "MVRS" from 1st.
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Meta's new logo
At a Facebook Connect event on Thursday, he detailed his vision for the Metaverse, which he sees as key to Facebook's appeal to younger users. “We’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile, from text to photos to video, but that’s not the end. The next platform and medium will be a more immersive and embodied internet, where you experience, not just Just looking at it, we call it the Metaverse.”
There is no doubt that the metaverse is one of the hottest outlets in 2021, but when we compare various metaverses, we find that there are great differences between them, the metaverse of the Crypto world, the metaverse of the traditional Internet, and the metaverse of the hardware first , the metaverse of IP clusters, different “metaverses” have different focuses and ideas, and when we look back at Facebook, it may have found a relatively neutral and integrated metaverse path.
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When looking back at the past of Facebook and the metaverse, people may think of Facebook’s new goals announced by Zuckerberg to the world at the end of June this year: “Today, in people’s eyes, we are a company mainly engaged in social media. In the future, We will effectively transform into a metaverse company."
With the entry of many Internet giants in the world, Metaverse, a word that was born in the last century, has become a hot word in the technology world. The rapid rise of "Metaverse" may make people mistakenly think that the current giants are competing to "advance layout", but in fact Facebook's layout of the Metaverse began many years ago-although this concept was almost unknown at the time know.
In 2014, Facebook acquired Oculus, the virtual device manufacturer of the "Metaverse Entrance" for $2.3 billion. The "VR" track was first revealed. The following year, the VR industry was considered by the market as "the eve of the explosion". At that time, 2015 was also called "the first year of VR". Investment banks and the entire market have huge expectations for this industry, and VR is also known as the "next-generation Internet entrance."
We all know the story behind. Facts have proved that the market has unrealistically high expectations for this industry. After a short hype, the VR winter is coming. Even today, we still use our smartphones as our greatest gateway to the internet. As for VR/AR/MR, no matter how many times the technical route jumps, "When will consumer-grade VR/AR/MR devices usher in an explosion?" is always a soul torture that plagues everyone in the industry.
The acquisition of Oculus seven years ago may be Facebook's biggest first-mover advantage in the Metaverse. Over the years, a series of competing products such as Google Daydream have long been discontinued. Oculus, on the other hand, has established a deep advantage. From high-end PC VR to entry-level all-in-one headsets, Oculus tried many directions and took many detours before opening the situation with Oculus Quest 2 in September 2020. In March of this year, Facebook announced that sales of Quest 2 exceeded the sum of all previous Quest series. The number of active users of the Quest series exceeds 10 million, and it dominates the VR equipment market with more than half of the market share.
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Facebook's Metaverse
In most of the content that introduces the metaverse, "Ready Player One" has always been a masterpiece of imagination in the metaverse. People imagine that the metaverse is a completely virtual world, or a world parallel to reality.
But Facebook doesn't want to make "Ready Player One". What Facebook wants to do is the ultimate combination of virtual and reality.
Perhaps, we can see the metaverse in the eyes of Facebook through the video of digital blogger "Dianwan Technology AK" explaining Facebook's virtual social platform Horizon Workrooms and Oculus Quest 2.
This is a Mixed Reality that combines AR and VR, and users can enter the virtual world Horizon Workrooms by wearing an Oculus Quest 2 device. In Horizon, real objects can be mapped to virtual space. If there are real object models in the system library, a 1:1 adaptation between virtual space and real space will also be performed.
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Source: Dianwan Technology AK
Community members can appear thousands of miles away in the same virtual space at the same time. Thanks to the 4 black and white wide-angle cameras equipped with Quest 2, it can capture the user's posture in the real world, making all behaviors in the virtual space more realistic.
Your movements, speech gestures, and eyebrow twitches in reality can all be completely mapped to the virtual space, and physical contact in the virtual space can also be perceived in reality. Your keyboard and monitor can be seamlessly mapped in the virtual world. Typing on the real keyboard can also be seen on the virtual screen; pop-up reminders from WeChat and email can also appear in the virtual space in front of you.
At this year's Facebook Connect conference, Facebook also launched a new device, Project Cambria, as well as development updates in the Metaverse. All experiences seem more real.
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What Zuckerberg wants to build is far more than just a "metaverse company"
Before Facebook's "All In" metaverse, cryptocurrencies were considered to be the track that Facebook was betting on with all its strength. The representative work was the Stablecoin Libra, which caused a sensation all over the world a few years ago, and is now renamed Diem.
As early as 2017, Facebook had already started its own related plans in the Blockchain field, but it did not disclose it to the public at the time. In May 2019, it was confirmed that Facebook was planning to launch a Crypto, which was called "GlobalCoin" or "Facebook Coin" at the time. In June, this plan was officially announced. The project was named Libra, and the members of the Libra Foundation can be called the "strongest group", covering giants in the fields of Internet, finance, retail, etc., including eBay, MasterCard, Visa etc.
In the original vision, this Stablecoin is not just anchored to the US dollar, but to a basket of fiat currencies. Its team wrote in the white paper, “Libra is a global currency based on Blockchain, backed by real assets, and governed by an independent association. In order to avoid currency price fluctuations caused by fluctuations in underlying assets, Libra does not cooperate with A single currency is "pegged" and the selected reserve assets include government currency securities in addition to creditworthy cash. "
With the support of more than 2 billion Facebook users, this grand plan aims to create not the existing USD Stablecoin, but a new world currency. But then, Libra faced pressure from regulators around the world. Under regulatory pressure, Libra and its successor, Diem, have not yet been officially launched.
In the long run, after obtaining permission from the regulatory side, Diem is likely to be integrated into Facebook's metaverse, and together with Facebook's digital wallet Novi, will become the infrastructure of Facebook's metaverse. Marcus, the head of Facebook's blockchain, has also publicly stated, "What I want to clarify is that our support for Diem has not changed. We intend to launch Novi with Diem after obtaining regulatory approval and going online. We care about cross-chain, we Hope to get it right."
In Facebook's view, the metaverse must not happen overnight. They once said, "Metaverse is a vision that spans many companies and even the entire technology industry. You can think of it as the successor of the mobile Internet. If we do well enough, I think in the next five years or so, we will Effectively transitioning from people seeing us as primarily a social media company to a metaverse company.”
Oculus Quest2 and Horizon alone have been hailed by many as the best technological products in the past ten years. They seem to be as amazing as the iPhone in 2007 and the current Tesla. I can't imagine how high Facebook's metaverse will bring our future social interaction.
