The story so far: On Thursday (October 28), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the rebranding of his company to Meta. The change, he said in a post, has been brought about “to reflect who we are and the future we hope to build”. Facebook, the social media platform, will, however, keep its name.

What is the future it is hoping to build?

It is called metaverse (thus the new name). Metaverse is what the Facebook founder calls “an embodied internet”. It is where “you’re in the experience, not just looking at it”. Mr. Zuckerberg gave a glimpse of the metaverse through a demo video. It shows him being called in to join his friends playing cards in a virtual space. They are all there as their chosen avatars, one of them even floating around the virtual room. They hide or reveal their cards just as they would in a real setting. He then dials another friend, who talks about an artist who is hiding augmented reality art pieces on street walls for people to find. The friends in the virtual space get sent the link of this art and view it then and there. Metaverse, for him, marks an evolution of how people connect with each other: “We’ve gone from desktop to web to mobile; from text to photos to video. But this isn’t the end of the line.”

Also read: Metaverse | What is the ‘next generation of Internet’ Zuckerberg and Nadella are talking about?

Is metaverse exclusive to Meta?

No. Mr. Zuckerberg sees metaverse as a successor to the mobile internet and as something that will see contributions from many companies. Metaverse is a virtual environment that will lend itself to immersive experiences. It means, according to Mr. Zuckerberg, “having a shared sense of space and not just looking at a grid of faces”. The “defining quality of the metaverse” is the feeling of presence. “You will see their facial expressions, you will see their body language… All the subtle ways that we communicate that today’s technology can’t quite deliver.”

Who else is talking about metaverse?

Video games company Epic Games, software giant Microsoft and chipmaker Nvidia are some of the companies that have been talking about metaverse. In a recent interview to Harvard Business Review, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said he sees the metaverse idea being fundamentally about this: “increasingly, as we embed computing in the real world, you can even embed the real world in computing”. Venture capitalist Matthew Ball wrote an essay last year: “What’s important is to recognise the metaverse isn’t a game, a piece of hardware, or an online experience. This is like saying World of Warcraft, the iPhone, or Google is the Internet. They are digital worlds, devices, services, websites, etc. The Internet is a wide set of protocols, technology, tubes and languages, plus access devices and content and communication experiences atop them. Metaverse will be too.”

Also Read | Facebook invests billions in metaverse efforts as ad business suffers

What are Facebook’s hopes with respect to metaverse?

Within the next decade, Mr. Zuckerberg wants the metaverse to reach a billion people. Toward this, the company plans to sell virtual reality devices at cost or at subsidised rates, and offer developer and creator services with low fees. Its metaverse ideas will likely emerge out of its work around virtual reality ideas such as Facebook Spaces.

What are critics saying?

Privacy is an area of concern because in an immersive environment, such as metaverse, a lot more of one’s personality and information will be revealed. Social media platforms, like Facebook, essentially make their money through targeted advertisements. It has to be recorded, however, that Mr. Zuckerberg has in his note mentioned privacy and safety as things that “need to be built into the metaverse from day one”.