Facebook is now Meta, but critics say same old problems remain

Facebook officially launched its new name on Thursday, one that focuses attention on where it sees its future while drawing attention away from its contentious present and past.

The Silicon Valley-based company hinted at its new corporate structure last week and again in its quarterly earnings call on Monday but officially unveiled what the metaverse-frenzy was all about at a virtual event on Thursday at which CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new name: Meta

Originally coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, the metaverse has come to mean different things over the years, but they are all built around the same premise: a fully immersive virtual reality that has versions of everything you'd find in real life so you have little reason to leave it.

To Facebook, it's the future.

Against a backdrop of digital avatars, Zuckerberg laid out a future world where friends from across the globe use their metaverse holograms to game together or attend concerts.

There are metaverse versions of work places and commerce, too, made possible by forthcoming hardware devices such as the company's Oculus VR headset and a new model of augmented-reality glasses reminiscent of Google Glasses but styled like RayBans.

Facebook's vision for the metaverse isn't one in which there are multiple different metaverses, all owned by different entities, but rather a collective one that seamlessly integrates with people's digital lives. Which is why they are focusing on it now, so that when it happens, Facebook-owned services and gadgets are poised to thrive within it.

The company offered few details about the high-end technological gadgets that were making some of the visual, audio and interactive elements in its presentation possible, but Facebook says it forecasts up to one billion people to be participating in some sort of metaverse within a decade.

Other tech companies, such as Microsoft, chipmaker Nvidia and Fortnite maker Epic Games, have all been outlining their own visions of how the metaverse will work. 

"That's cool," said Richard Kerris, vice-president of Nvidia's Omniverse platform, after being told by a reporter of Facebook's name change.

"We think there's going to be lots of companies building virtual worlds and environments in the metaverse, in the same way there's ... lots of companies doing things on the [internet]."

A lot of what Facebook hopes to contribute to the metaverse is still years away, but the company made clear it is going all in on the concept already.

"We are fully committed to this," Zuckerberg said. "It is the next chapter for our work and, we believe, for the internet overall."

The metaverse is so central to the company's future that it has reorganized its entire business around it, putting social media properties such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in one distinct business unit and metaverse-focused virtual and augmented reality labs in another, all under the Meta parent company.