The metaverse according to Facebook

All of us knows Facebook and all of us knows its creator, the undisputed king of the social networks, Zuckerberg. But the big family Facebook isn’t only the famous blue social. Facebook includes social networks, videogames, digital money, virtual reality and all the best of the technology. If the social network ruled the world of the last fifteen years, what will happen in the future? The future will be very similar to the one thought by Ready Player One and guess who wants to be the undisputed king of the new future. The future, according to Facebook, is the metaverse.

The declarations of Zuckerberg

Maybe the declaration of Zuckerberg about the metaverse go unnoticed when, during an interview for The Verge, he said: “My hope, if we will do good, is that in five years, more or less, in the next chapter of our company, we will pass to be seen as a social media company to be a metaverse company”.

Anyway, the journalist didn’t investigated about it, even if maybe Zuckerberg was right waiting for some extra question. Maybe the king of the social wanted to use the interview for the launch of the new project, but it wasn’t so.

What seemed to be the declaration of a remote project, the secret wish of Zuckerberg, to be the leader of a whole universe, the metaverse, it was in reality something much more real and close that we thought.

Metaverse Product Group, the project started

Only few days later that famous interview, infact, Andrew Bosworth, vicepresident of the group of virtual and augmented reality of Facebook, announced the project Metaverse Product Group.

To drive the project will be Vishal Shah, which comes from the Instagram distrect. Together with him there will be Vivek Sharma, already leader of the project Horizon, and Jason Rubin.

But what’s the metaverse? The metaverse is a future scenario where the digital world and real world melted ever more, by becoming interconnected.

How will the metaverse of Facebook be

The metaverse is an universe, aimed as a closed environment. Inside this closed environment there will be all the productions of the family Facebook. There won’t be anymore Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp or the virtual enviroments of the Oculus Rift. Or better they will still exist but they will co-exist, they will melt together by giving life to an alternative world. A world where we can play, work, do shopping, make friends, live.

We won’t open anymore the application of Facebook, we won’t scroll anymore the home while looking for news. In the future we will literally walk inside Facebook. Is it remembering you something? Yes, that’s right, Zuckerberg wants to become the king of Oasis.

In reality he already tried to do it with Horizon, but with the metaverse he wants to do a further step, by melting all the technologies and all the instruments that he has.

The rules of the metaverse

Let’s make a small step back. To firstly talk about the metaverse it was Neal Stephenson in the romance of the 1992, Snow Crash. Stephenson with the word metaverse indicated a 3D virtual reality that we could reach with an avatar.

Zuckerberg, obviusly, isn’t the only one that wants to create his own digital world. Closed universes as the one of Roblox or Fortnite, are already new born metaverses. And we must mention Pokemon Go too that is literally mapping the whole real world to create a digital twin.

By the way, the metaverse, to be consider so, it must follow some rules:

• Persistent: it can’t be stopped and it can’t be switched off.
• It must be in realtime and live.
• It doesn’t have to have a limit of partecipants. Theoretically al the world population might simulatenously loggin in.
• It must have a completely working economy.
• It must melt the real world and the digital one into one experience.
• The contents can be used in any place of the metaverse.

And will be Facebook able to follow all the rules and really create its special metaverse?

This post is also available in: Italiano