Minjun Son
2021. 11.02
Image source: Facebook
“Facebook is no longer our number one priority. The metaverse will be the new future.” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a confident tone.
Facebook changed its name to “Meta”. Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg strengthened the Metaverse business, saying, “I want Facebook to be recognized as a Metaverse company in five years.” This time, the company name was changed altogether. As Zuckerberg said, “Our current mission is to represent only one product: Facebook, so we can’t represent the diversity of what we’re doing today.”
On this day, Facebook held the ‘Connect Conference’, an annual VR/AR related event, and announced its Metaverse related business for 1 hour and 30 minutes. The metaverse is a space newly created online using virtual and augmented reality technology. The user’s avatar can work, exercise and chat with friends in the newly created online space. It is easy to understand if you think of the movie ‘The Matrix’.
Zuckerberg actually did a “one-man show” at an online event that day. He alone introduced the metaverse definition and the metaverse service launched by Facebook, and played a fencing game combined with the metaverse. He guided a user privacy book in the form of answering an employee’s question and asked the metaverse space developers like a reporter. This is unusual compared to the CEOs of big tech companies who come out briefly at conferences or new product presentations and hand over microphones to developers or marketers. Industry analysts say that Zuckerberg’s obsession with the metaverse is strong.
The metaverse world that Facebook introduced on that day looked like something out of a movie. When you put on something that looks just like real glasses, various screens and 3D graphics appear as holograms in front of your eyes. If you click on it with your finger, rotate the hologram, and call a colleague, the avatar of the colleague from afar is summoned in front of your eyes. You can sit around and play card games with your avatar-type friends, and you can play table tennis or 3-on-3 basketball with your avatars. “We’re also working hard on developing hardware for the metaverse,” Zuckerberg said.
Image source: Facebook
The reasons for Facebook changing its name and rushing to the metaverse are complex. As AR/VR devices develop and related services increase, the metaverse-related market is gradually growing. In the representative metaverse game Roblox, users use Robux, a currency dedicated to the platform, and the amount that users purchased Roblox in the second quarter of this year alone was $670 million.
Companies are also holding recruitment briefing sessions or presentations inside the metaverse, and the use of metaverse is increasing across industries. The Information, an IT media, estimated that the metaverse-related market would reach at least $82 billion (about 96 trillion won) by 2025. Facebook is determined to dominate the metaverse market.
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