Deciphering Facebook’s Meta

Pramendra Gupta
4 min readOct 30, 2021
Credit: ABC News

Metaverse: The idea is depicted in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash

Metaverse is used to describe a virtual reality world, where people go to live, work, and play in a full-sensory environment.

It is an experience so immersive that it’s hard to distinguish from reality.

What is the Metaverse?

In the metaverse, you might use a headset to enter a virtual world connecting all sorts of digital environments.

Unlike current VR, which is mostly used for gaming, this virtual world could be used for practically anything — work, play, concerts, cinema trips — or just hanging out.

Experiences of the Metaverse

If you own a non-fungible token (NFT) or even just some crypto, then you have already partaken in the metaverse experience.

Credit: NPR

Video games already have metaverse-like elements

like Roblox and Fortnite, as well as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, have metaverse-like elements.

Perfect Timing

Digital technology has kept us connected during the pandemic

Of all the events leading up to this, the pandemic most notably led consumers to renegotiate our relationship with the internet. As the world around us got wrapped in lockdowns, we sought out

  • New ways to transport ourselves without moving physically.
  • Safety-induced measures turned our homes into offices, gyms, and schools.
  • A captive situation, which would otherwise seem dystopian, unwound and re-wired itself into our conscience as a Lysol-wiped safe haven.

Meta’s Goal: Embodied Internet You Are Inside Of

Facebook Wants Us to Live in the Metaverse

Credit: Blockworks

“Our overarching goal across all of these initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life,” Zuckerberg said.

This is a pivot not only in terms of the strategic focus of the company, but also in our perception of the idea itself.
The metaverse is not just a virtual world that we can step into, but instead
a world that we can embody ourselves.

Will help people “deliver and experience a much stronger sense of presence with the people they care about, the people they work with, the places they want to be.”

Metaverse at Workplace and Home

  • where individuals can work together with one another, their media, and real-world objects via VR headsets (like Fb’s Oculus Quest 2), smartphone AR, and sensible glasses
  • capable of work and play collectively in custom-made digital houses and worlds
  • and presumably, even interact in a “metaverse financial system” the place they will construct companies

Metaverse Roadmap

  • Meta expects the metaverse will probably be mainstream within the subsequent 5 to 10 years.
  • With as many as a billion customers by that time.

Facebook has lots of data and experience in the space (like Fb’s Oculus Quest 2), smartphone AR, and sensible glasses.

Who else is interested in the metaverse?

Creator economy

The immersive experience will increase engagement in various categories such as games, e-commerce, sports, travel, and etc. More time means more content means metaverse experience will accelerate creator economy

NFT

The Creator economy will accelerate growth in NFT asNFT will go beyond traditional digital art.

Workplace

Credit: vrfocus

Greater immersiveness will enable coworkers to participate in ways that are still challenging through existing technologies

Games

Increasingly immersive (more adapted to sense-of-place, more social, more interactive) and crafted by an exponential rise in creators.

Immersive Commerce

It allows to see the objective in proper scale and put them in a context where it can be used.

Shopify Uses VR and AR to Design a New Consumer Experience

Real Estate

Look for the experience to become more social and more interactive as the metaverse absorbs the real-estate industry

Travel

One of the most expensive and ecologically-taxing industries is travel. From single-player to multiplayer experience where you are actually there — with your friends — via telepresence.

Education

Educators will apply learnings from games to make the experience more fun and interesting that will change in the future as the metaverse transforms education to be more immersive, more social.

Volumetric Livestreaming

Digital sports

Sources

  1. https://onezero.medium.com/facebooks-metaverse-is-designed-to-strengthen-our-relationships-9c113ffc08b8
  2. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58749529
  3. https://medium.com/building-the-metaverse/the-experiences-of-the-metaverse-2126a7899020

--

--

Pramendra Gupta

Stay ahead of the curve. Subscribe for emerging business & tech trends in byte-sized chunks. Intrapreneur @ Mercari🗼🇯🇵 https://www.linkedin.com/in/pram-gupta