Facebook is planning to change its identity, and the first change in what is expected to be a long series will be to switch to a new name. The move is part of the tech giant’s plan to build a so-called “metaverse.” According to unnamed Facebook sources cited by The Verge, the name change will be announced by Mark Zuckerberg at the annual Connect conference on October 28, 2021. Although he plans to announce the change at the prominent event, the Facebook CEO may decide to make the information public even sooner.
A Change Less Visible to the Regular User
Before you wonder which social network you’ll be browsing from now on, you should know that the change is likely to affect only the parent company: just as it happened when Google became Alphabet, but actually stayed Google. Only this time, there will be an ecosystem that includes Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. For years now, Zuckerberg has been trying to convince the public that Facebook is not just a social network.
All of this is leading towards the metaverse that Zuckerberg dreams of. This change is better felt behind the curtain, with the division that handles augmented reality glasses employing no less than 10,000 workers.
Facebook Wants You to Forget What It Did Last Summer
In recent years, we have witnessed some major scandals between Facebook and… well, pretty much everyone. Changing the name of the parent company is a smart move in that regard. After all, having a name directly associated with the world’s most (controversial) popular social network has its drawbacks. Future scandals could affect the company’s fate as a whole, even if each of its subsidiaries is somewhat independent.
From a business perspective, it is easy to see what the fuss is about regarding this change. Perhaps Zuckerberg is tired of always being in the spotlight for the wrong reasons and wants to focus on other things.
One of those might even be the AR (augmented reality) eyewear division. A hint about the new name also comes from this direction, as the name of the first (as yet, unreleased) model of glasses is Horizon. Recently, the app associated with them was christened Horizon Worlds. For a short time, there was also a reputed Horizon Workrooms, a sort of Google Classroom but for corporate employees.
Smart Glasses and the “Ego4D” Project
Mark Zuckerberg imagines a future where smart glasses developed by Facebook “become as useful in everyday life as smartphones.”
To make the Facebook CEO’s dream a reality, the company will first need to develop powerful AI software that can “read” and respond to the world around the wearer of the glasses. The only way an AI can be trained to see and hear the world in the same way as humans is to experience the environment the same way we do: from a first-person perspective.
“[Next-generation] AI [technologies] will need to learn from videos that show the world at the center of the action,” explains a recent post on Facebook’s blog.
Facebook’s solution to this problem is a new project called “Ego4D” that aims to “collect data from 13 universities and labs in 9 countries, which have already collected over 2,200 hours of first-person video footage from over 700 participants going about their daily lives.” Facebook says this data will be freely available to the scientific community, but the goal of “Ego4D” is clear: to create a type of AI that can be installed on many of the devices Facebook is currently working on.
Mark Zuckerberg’s company has also created its own division for researching and developing VR (virtual reality) and AR technologies, called Reality Labs. Facebook already produces the hugely popular Oculus Quest 2 VR headset and has plans to transition from VR to AR technologies in the coming years.
Twitter CEO Mocks Zuckerberg’s Plans to Turn Facebook into a “Metaverse”
After the story broke out, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey mocked Mark Zuckerberg’s plans to turn Facebook into a “metaverse,” agreeing with a tweet calling it a “dystopian corporate dictatorship.”
Dorsey retweeted a post from a user called udiverse21, referencing author Neal Stephenson, who first coined the term “metaverse” in 1992.
The tweet read: “the word ‘metaverse’ was coined by Neal Stephenson in the book ‘Snowcrash’ and it originally described a virtual world owned by corporations where end-users were treated as citizens in a dystopian corporate dictatorship. What if Neal was right.”
As Dorsey retweeted the post, he added: “NARRATOR: He was.”
