New Delhi: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the company is changing its name to Meta, in order to focus on its efforts to build the Metaverse.
Zuckerberg called the metaverse "the next version of the internet", and said the tech giant wants to be recognised as a metaverse company now.
The rebranding comes amid public relations crises faced by Facebook.
'Meta', the company's official Twitter handle, tweeted: "Announcing @Meta — the Facebook company’s new name. Meta is helping to build the metaverse, a place where we’ll play and connect in 3D. Welcome to the next chapter of social connection.”
What Does Meta Mean?
The term metaverse is a portmanteau of the prefix ‘meta’, which is a Greek word meaning “beyond”, and "universe".
Metaverse is a multiverse that interoperates more with the real world, and incorporates augmented reality overlays.
Origin Of The Concept Of Metaverse
The metaverse concept originated in the dystopian, science fiction novel, Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson. The novel’s protagonist, Hiro, is a hacker who spends a lot of time in an imaginary, computer-generated universe known as the Metaverse.
The term was also used in Ernest Cline’s novel, Ready Player One.
Since then, many movies have shown a metaverse. Metaverse is attracting a lot of buzz in the Silicon Valley.
The Matrix (1999) had humans living in a virtual world created by artificial intelligence, unaware that this is not the real world.
What Is Metaverse?
The metaverse is a space in which the real world and the virtual world come together. It appears to be turning into a reality—bringing together virtual and augmented reality, the Internet and real life.
There will be digital representations of people in the metaverse, which will be called avatars. The avatars can perform a wide range of activities from interacting during work, attending concerts to gaming, and even wearing digital clothes.
The metaverse can refer to digital spaces that appear more lifelike due to the use of virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR).
The term is also used to describe gaming worlds, where users have a character and they walk around interacting with other gamers.
Metaverse is used to describe the concept of a future iteration of the internet, made up of shared, 3D virtual spaces.
Facebook’s metaverse is the next evolution of social connection, claims Meta. It is a collective project that will be created by people all over the world, and is open to everyone. People will be able to socialise, learn, collaborate and play in ways that go beyond what is possible today.
Zuckerberg said the rebrand would bring its different apps, and technologies under one new brand. The names of the company's apps—Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp—will remain the same.