Facebook announced its parent company name-change at the Facebook Connect augmented and virtual reality conference, a move that supposedly reflects the company’s growing ambitions beyond social media.
Facebook on Thursday announced that it has changed its company name to Meta.
The name change was announced at the Facebook Connect augmented and virtual reality conference.
Facebook, now known as Meta, has chosen the moniker, based on the sci-fi term ‘metaverse’, to describe its vision for working in a virtual world.
“Today we are seen as a social media company, but in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people, and the metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg on Thursday provided a demonstration of the company’s ambitions for the metaverse. The company also said this week it’d spend about $10 billion over the next year developing the technologies required for building the metaverse.
The company expects “to invest many billions of dollars for years to come before the metaverse reaches scale,” Zuckerberg added.
The demo was a Pixar-like animation of software the company hopes to build some day. The demo included users hanging out in space as cartoon-like versions of themselves or fantastical characters, like a robot, that represent their virtual avatars.
Zuckerberg made a point of accusing competitors who he believes are ‘stifling innovation’ with high developer fees.
“We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg said.
Additionally, Meta announced a new virtual reality headset named Project Cambria.
The device will be a high-end product available at a higher price point than the $299 Quest 2 headset, the company said in a blog post.
Project Cambria will be released next year, Zuckerberg said.
Meta also announced the code name of its first fully AR-capable smart glasses: Project Nazare. The glasses are “still a few years out,” the company said in a blog post.
Zuckerberg said “we still have a ways to go with Nazare, but we’re making good progress.”
The re-branding comes amid a barrage of news reports over the past month after Frances Haugen, a former employee-turned-whistleblower, released a trove of internal company documents to news outlets, lawmakers and regulators.
The reports show that the company is aware of many of the harms its apps and services cause but either doesn’t rectify the issues or struggles to address them.
More documents are expected to be shared daily over the coming weeks.
The re-branding also comes after the company has dealt with a barrage of news reports over the past month stemming from whistleblower Frances Haugen’s trove of internal documents.
In a call with analysts on Monday, Zuckerberg vehemently refuted the claims and critiques in the reports stemming from the documents provide by Haugen.
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