Facebook Plans To Hire 10,000 People In Europe To Build Its ‘Metaverse’

The metaverse is a fictional concept in which the real world and the virtual world come together, a technology in which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shown keen interest

Facebook logo seen displayed on a smartphone | Photo: Getty

New Delhi: Facebook has said it plans to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to build the "metaverse", a new computing platform that aims to connect people virtually.

The hiring will be done over the next five years, 

Metaverse is a virtual reality version of the internet which Facebook visualises as the future.

What Is Metaverse & What Is Facebook Doing To Develop This?

The metaverse has been a fictional concept that brings together the real and the virtual worlds. Like many other fictional concepts, the metaverse appears to be turning into a reality.

The metaverse is believed to blur the lines between the physical world and the digital world, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shown great interest in this project. 

On September 27, Facebook announced an investment of $50 million in the metaverse project.

It is a space that brings together virtual and augmented reality, the Internet and real life. Besides Facebook, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella too has said the company is heavily investing in the “enterprise metaverse”, according to news reports.

With the help of the metaverse technology, one can wear virtual reality glasses that will give the person the feeling of being exactly in front of a friend, though the person is far away in reality and is connected only through the internet.

In a blog post, Facebook said access to new creative, social, and economic opportunities can be unlocked using the metaverse technology.

"Today, we are announcing a plan to create 10,000 new high skilled jobs within the European Union (EU) over the next five years.", the blog post read.

Facebook said it will include "highly specialised engineers" in the metaverse team.

The blog post also said EU is a great place for tech companies to invest, because of advantages such as a large consumer market, first class universities, and top quality talent.

Horizon To Metaverse 

The announcement comes as the tech giant is trying to resolve issues such as major outages of its services. Facebook also received a lot of backlash over the past month after a former employee Frances Haugen leaked internal studies that show Facebook knew the fact that its sites are detrimental to the mental health of young people.

In July, Zuckerberg had predicted that Facebook will transition from "primary being a social media company to being a metaverse company" over the next five years.

Since 2014, Facebook has been developing Horizon. This is a digital world where people can interact using VR technology. This happened after Facebook bought Oculus, a company that builds virtual reality headsets, for $2 billion in 2014.

Facebook unveiled Horizon Workrooms in August, which is a feature that enables workers wearing VR headsets to hold meetings in a virtual room. They can see each other as cartoonish 3D versions of themselves using this feature.