Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the company’s new name will be Meta, designed to bring the technology giant’s “apps and technologies under one new company brand.”
According to a company news release, Meta’s focus is to bring to life the metaverse, which the company described as a digital experience that will feel “like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world.”
“The next platform will be even more immersive — an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it. We call this the metaverse, and it will touch every product we build,” Zuckerberg said in a letter released on Thursday.
“The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence — like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology,” the company’s founder continued. “That is why we are focused on building this.”
Zuckerberg claimed that future technology will allow people to “teleport instantly as a hologram,” allowing users to go to the office without commuting, attend a concert with friends, or catch up with family in their parents’ living room. He said hologram technology will “open up more opportunity no matter where you live,” and help users “cut down time in traffic” and “reduce your carbon footprint.”
“Think about how many physical things you have today that could just be holograms in the future,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Your TV, your perfect work setup with multiple monitors, your board games and more — instead of physical things assembled in factories, they’ll be holograms designed by creators around the world.”
Zuckerberg said Facebook – now Meta – has always focused on “connecting people,” which he said makes his company stand apart from “most tech companies” that “focus on how people interact with technology.”
“Facebook is one of the most used technology products in the history of the world. It’s an iconic social media brand,” Zuckerberg said.
“Building social apps will always be important for us, and there’s a lot more to build. But increasingly, it’s not all we do. In our DNA, we build technology to bring people together. The metaverse is the next frontier in connecting people, just like social networking was when we got started.”
“I’m proud of what we’ve built so far, and I’m excited about what comes next — as we move beyond what’s possible today, beyond the constraints of screens, beyond the limits of distance and physics, and towards a future where everyone can be present with each other, create new opportunities and experience new things,” he continued. “It is a future that is beyond any one company and that will be made by all of us.”
