The metaverse is on Facebook’s mind

The Future. Mark Zuckerberg has a new vision for Facebook: become a metaverse company. It’s ambitious, but not totally surprising, since Facebook is still the largest social platform in the world and has made extensive investments in VR, AR, and e-commerce. A metaverse just brings you inside of the platform… possibly making sure that users never have a reason to leave.

Inside the Internet

Mark Zuckerberg wants to bring you inside Facebook.

• During Facebook’s Q2 earnings call, the Facebook CEO said that the ambition of the company is to help create a digital world known as the “metaverse.”
• Per Zuckerberg: “It’s the future we are working towards. A virtual environment where you can be present with people in a digital space. An embodied Internet that you are inside of.”
• But Facebook won’t be able to corner the market here because the concept requires “new protocols, new payment systems — basically a new everything — and will create a lot of economic value.”
• The metaverse will be accessible through “all apps and devices” and essentially create an embodied digital world, where users can even “dance.”
• Zuckerberg explained his ideas in more detail with The Verge just last week.

Facebook probably envisions users entering the metaverse via goggles from the company’s Oculus division, which is one of the leading VR and AR brands. Additionally, the social platform announced its next hardware release: a pair of “smart glasses” made with Ray-Ban and EssilorLuxottica.

Metaverse Marketplace

Zuckerberg surely turned heads when he declared that the metaverse is “the next generation of the Internet and the next chapter of us as a company” and that people will eventually transition “from seeing us as a social media company, to seeing us as a metaverse company.” Those are lofty goals, and the company claimed that it will invest billions annually to make it happen.

This was all said during a Wall Street conference call after all, so Zuckerberg assured investors that, yes, money is still on his mind — the company’s push into e-commerce is a pillar of the metaverse future. Bank of America liked what they heard, upgrading Facebook’s stock by 18%.

With Facebook counting roughly three billion monthly active users globally, a digital world will surely have no problem finding a population.