California, 24th Nov 2021: Facebook Inc. is now officially named Meta Platforms Inc., or simply: Meta. The company owned by Mark Zuckerberg is undergoing a rebrand that will shift the core business of the social media giant into a new realm that will begin to develop an industry forged in the concept of the Metaverse.
The Metaverse is a relatively new concept that’s beginning to gain momentum in the technological and innovational agendas. The metaverse refers to the digital and virtual environments that are ever-present in our daily activities that involve entertainment, work, or even dating.
When you log in to your gaming console to play GTA Online, you’re entering the metaverse. When you join a Teams meeting, you’re also making use of the metaverse, and when you chat online thru dating apps, you’re in the metaverse as well.
And according to the statement shared by Zuckerberg at the Facebook Connect conference, we can understand that Facebook (now Meta) wants not only to be a contributor in this technological universe but to be the main actor when thinking about the metaverse.
Facebook’s past ventures into other projects such as Horizon Workrooms and Oculus now make complete sense. Horizon is a virtual room that uses virtual reality (VR) and where work colleagues can interact between them thru virtual avatars of themselves.
It’s like a game of SIMS but in real life, as you can enter a virtual room with colleagues in different locations, and thanks to the Oculus virtual reality glasses you feel as if you’re all together and even work on a virtual whiteboard.
Oculus is another company by itself that was bought by Facebook in 2014. Its main business core was that of online gaming with the Oculus VR headsets that allow the development of fully immersive 3D games where the user can feel like the actual character of a videogame.
And there are other companies such as Spanish Cupra that are investing efforts to enter the metaverse thru the development of augmented reality (AR) apps where clients are able to broadcast a Cupra car on the screen of their smartphone or tablet and interact with almost every function of the vehicle. It gives the client the chance to see every detail of the car from their homes or to look at a special feature that’s not available in the dealership.
Sorare is also building an NFT empire in the sports sector. These are digital trading cards that are only available in the metaverse. Some of them are limited to a certain number of copies and some of them are getting valued at thousands of dollars.
But the applications of businesses in the metaverse are endless. Imagine brand new online casinos that would like to innovate in their activities. These platforms are renowned for offering great standards in the safety and security of the information of their clients, they are experiencing amazing growth numbers thanks to the bonuses and promotions they have in order to attract new customers and have a massive selection of casino games to keep their clients entertained with slots, poker, blackjack, and others.
Now they could take the next step and start offering virtual reality games to their clients. They could start partnering with Facebook and their Oculus department to start developing games in Meta’s metaverse and the possibilities that this would open to the industry are infinite.
This is something that Facebook will start doing from now until the release of their metaverse: Exploring business opportunities with different industries to bring the most on board of this new project.
We haven’t still got any details on when this new metaverse would be released but we can expect a gradual delivery of apps and products that will begin to introduce us to the virtual world that Facebook is planning.
The main question in the future will be if the different metaverses that are already available will remain separate or will be compatible between them like Zepeto and Sandbox that announced an agreement so their users can have their same avatars in both metaverses.
And if the idea of the metaverse is still a bit abstract to you, just watch the Hollywood movie Ready Player One. You’ll definitely get a full grasp of what this could mean for the future.