Facebook has been hinting at a stronger VR push for a while. The majority of its acquisitions over the last two years have involved VR startups or related companies, and this year in its July earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg elaborated on this vision for the metaverse. It should be noted that Facebook has come under significant regulatory scrutiny this year, for a set of internal documents revealed across September. Facebook was quick to address the charges and amid all of this, declared a complete refresh in its corporate direction.
The newly minted Meta builds on Facebook’s impressive legacy as a social media company, which changed the way the world communicates. While it wasn’t the first of its kind, it was definitely the most influential social media platform and now has approximately 2.91 billion monthly active users around the world.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has similar ambitions for Meta and the metaverse platform, and hopes to sign on a billion new users relatively quickly this time, in the next one decade.
What Is Meta?
Meta can be best described as a social technology company, where all of the company’s applications, products, and services help to “bring the metaverse to life.” The metaverse is an immersive VR space where users can engage in complex interactions with each other and with the world around them. And unlike typical VR apps, the metaverse will converge multiple virtual worlds each designed for a discrete purpose.
Under Meta, existing products like Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Oculus, and Messenger as well as new ones will together fuel this vision.
Meta is similar to Facebook, in that its core product is still social experiences – albeit now in a different realm. Meta is also different from Facebook as it intends to invest billions of dollars in building the metaverse, along with associated technologies like sophisticated VR, AR headsets, MR SDKs, advanced hand-tracking controllers, haptic feedback, and much more. How will this impact work? With time, it is justified to expect that Meta will have as pervasive an impact on our work lives as Facebook’s many services and social philosophy.
Meta’s Role in Unified Communications and Collaboration
There are five ways in which Meta will influence UC through its flagship product, the metaverse.
Revolutionising remote collaboration
One of the main problems of remote collaboration right now, is that it is an extremely low touch experience. Communication is mostly asynchronous and there is none of the intimacy that we’d experience face-to-face. Meta will transform remote work by allowing collaborators to be present in the same virtual space, at the same time, and go through the same files like a real-world office. Meta is already partnering with UC companies like Zoom to bring sophisticated whiteboarding into the metaverse.
Opening up new frontiers in interoperability
One of the defining traits of the metaverse is that it is converged and interoperable. In other words, multiple companies cannot have their own metaverses. There’s only one metaverse – the metaverse – and even if it is built by Meta (Facebook), it will remain completely decentralised. This singular metaverse will bring together multiple apps and services through seamless interoperability so that employees can teleport to and from spaces to complete tasks.
