[Independentie](https://www.independent.ie/) | 13.5°C [Dublin](/weather/) Last week The promise of the metaverse is to bring them all together.Facebook has created a new metaverse product group — and currently has more than 700 open positions in AR and VR.Its Oculus and Portal products are the building blocks of the new vision.Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview with Casey Newton of The Verge: “What virtual and augmented reality can do, and what the metaverse broadly is going to help people experience, is a sense of presence that I think is just much more natural in the way that we’re made to interact…In the future, instead of just doing this over a phone call, you’ll be able to sit as a hologram on my couch, or I’ll be able to sit as a hologram on your couch, and it’ll actually feel like we’re in the same place.” But Facebook isn’t the only company that sees the potential in the metaverse.Zuckerberg’s thoughts sound remarkably similar to Manuel Bronstein, Roblox’s chief product officer.
“While shared experiences in the metaverse today are about doing fun things together, in the future they will be about literally anything people can do together in real life: learn together, play together, or work together,” he said earlier this year.Sound familiar? Snapchat has just announced the launch of 3D bitmojis, its own first step into the metaverse.
And Epic Games, the owner of Fortnite, closed a $1bn round of funding in April, which will support metaverse ambitions.There are other well-funded players too; VRChat, Core, Sansar and Decentraland and others are all jostling for position.“It’s certainly not something that any one company is going to build,” Mark Zuckerberg said.“I think a good vision for the metaverse is not one that a specific company builds, but it has to have the sense of interoperability and portability.
You have your avatar and your digital goods, and you want to be able to teleport anywhere.You don’t want to just be stuck within one company’s stuff.” Gaming is obviously a key area — and it’s big business.Video game industry revenue is forecast to top $180bn in 2021.
But there’s a big question about customer demand outside gaming.Zuckerberg’s vision for virtual working may be a bit far out for many companies who are more focused on safely returning staff to offices or hybrid working models, rather than a three-dimensional virtual space for collaboration and productivity.When it comes to the world of work, the metaverse may be the right idea at the wrong time.
But Facebook’s ambition is clear and the logic is sound.The company wants to capture as much human activity as possible in new virtual spaces, and tie it into their existing ecosystem, and ecosystems that haven’t been created yet.Facebook is incredibly well-placed in this space as the internet’s de facto identity layer.Plus products such as the Libra cryptocurrency could really take off in the metaverse.Facebook’s new metaverse product group will initially focus on building the connections that will help users move between different systems and virtual spaces with persistent identity.This means that even if Facebook’s vision of the metaverse isn’t realised in terms of user experiences, the company could own and control as much of the infrastructure of the next phase of the internet as possible.
Facebook embraced the mobile internet in 2011 as it recognised that was the direction of users’ habits and attention.It developed mobile products and experiences with laser focus — so you wouldn’t bet against the company.But this time around two key things are different.First, user demand around this space is fragmented and in many instances related to individual platforms like Fortnite or Roblox.As a result, consumer demand for interoperability, persistent identity and more needs to be manufactured; compelling use cases and collaboration will be vital.Second, and more crucially for Facebook given its many issues around misinformation and transparency, will users, other companies and legislators be willing to trust Mark Zuckerberg and co.as architects of the next phase of the internet? Premium Premium.