Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has come a long way since the days of creating a ranking website for college girls. That website became the Facebook social media giant we know today; that social media giant is now one of the most powerful companies in the world.
Zuckerberg no longer wants Facebook to just be known for social media. In recent years, the company has invested heavily in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, sucking up Oculus in the process. However, just VR and AR isn't enough, the Facebook CEO wants the company to be the king of the metaverse.
Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to rule the metaverse
In the latest episode of The Vergecast, Mark Zuckerberg explained his hopes for the future of Facebook. The next great technological step: the metaverse is a joining of physical, augmented and virtual realities. As cliché as this is, imagine Ready Player One but with people you like... and people you don't.
Zuckerberg describes Facebook's metaverse goals as the “next chapter" of the company. Instead of being a passive viewer of content on a phone or laptop, “you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing, for example.”
How this differs from VR social hangouts like VRChat or Rec Room is more hypothetical than explained. He explained:
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A near future?
In the podcast, Mark Zuckerberg explains that everything occurring at Facebook this moment will eventually converge on the metaverse idea. From the company's social media team to Oculus to the AR development, everything is pushing towards a coherent future.
“It just touches a lot of the biggest themes that we’re working on,” he said. “I think all of these different initiatives that we have at Facebook today will basically ladder up together to contribute to helping to build this metaverse vision.”
The Facebook CEO explains that the goal for the metaverse to at least start is over the next half-decade or so. He hopes that it'll be what Facebook is eventually known for instead of just a collection of online blogs.
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Technology isn't there yet
In the interview, Mark Zuckerberg does admit that technology has a way to go before his dream of a metaverse is actually possible. While advancements in VR and AR have been rapidly improving the technologies, they're limited and uncomfortable for long stretches.
“There's clearly an evolution, or multiple, in the technology that are going to need to be possible, that will need to happen before this is the main way that people work,” he said. “But I think we’re going to be there by the end of this decade. Today, the VR headsets, they’re still kind of a bit clunky, they may be a bit heavier than you would ideally like them to be. There need to be advances in being able to express yourself and having higher resolution, being able to read text better, a number of things like that. But we’re getting there, and each version is better and better.”
He continued:
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