What is Metaverse? Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn Facebook into a Metaverse company?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg drew eyeballs earlier this week after he told his employees that he was driving his company towards becoming a 'Metaverse'; a term usually heard in videogames and sci-fi movies. According to Zuckerberg, the plan was to shift the company from working on building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to support them to a platform that would build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences known as the 'metaverse'.

Several US media portals quoted him as saying, “What I think is most interesting is how these themes will come together into a bigger idea,” Zuckerberg said. “Our overarching goal across all of these initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life," he added.

What is Metaverse?

First heard in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, a metaverse quite literally means a collective virtual shared space which is the sum of all virtual worlds and the internet. Distinct from augmented reality, a metaverse may contain derivatives or copies of the real world. So how is Facebook planning to apply this sci-fi concept to real life?

Zuckerberg believes that he would be able to build a system where people move between virtual reality (VR), AR, and even 2D devices, using realistic avatars of themselves where appropriate. So, sitting in a cafe, people would be able to pull up a workstation, with a snap of their fingers. A metaverse would help people work, socialize, share things, and have other experiences through a convergence of physical, augmented, and virtual reality in a shared online space, something that games such as Fortnite, Roblox, and even Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been explored of doing.

Why does Zuckerberg want to turn Facebook into a metaverse company?

In an interview with Casey Newton from The Vergecast, Zuckerberg detailed his concept of the metaverse and how it will help bring enormous opportunity to individual creators and artists who want to work and own homes far from today’s urban centers or those who live in places where opportunities for education or recreation are more limited. While virtual reality is an important part of a metaverse, it isn’t just virtual reality. Mark Zuckerberg plans to make metaverse accessible across all different computing platforms-- VR and AR, PC, mobile devices, and even game consoles.

In an interview with The Vergecast he says, "A lot of people also think about the metaverse as primarily something that’s about gaming. And I think entertainment is clearly going to be a big part of it, but I don’t think that this is just gaming. I think that this is a persistent, synchronous environment where we can be together, which I think is probably going to resemble some kind of a hybrid between the social platforms that we see today, but an environment where you’re embodied in it." 

The tech billionaire aims to start this next chapter for Facebook over the next five years or so. He hopes that the traverse will effectively transition from people seeing the company as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.