Facebook sets up new team for digital world, 'Metaverse'

Facebook is making strong moves to set up a product team for its "metaverse", a new concept of a digital world where multiple people can access virtually at the same time. 

The company's metaverse exec team will be part of Facebook's virtual reality team. The executive in charge of product at Instagram, Vishal Shah will be joining the metaverse team.

"Today, Portal and Oculus can teleport you into a room with another person regardless of physical distance, or to new virtual worlds and experiences," Andrew Bosworth, Reality Labs executive. "But to achieve our full vision of the Metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces."

Bosworth added that the goal is to be able to connect people without any "limitations of physics" to allow them move with ease between virtual rooms as they would with their physical rooms.

Zuckerberg, in an interview with The Verge, last week, said Facebook's metaverse will be available on virtual reality headsets, game consoles, as well as mobile devices.

"And my hope, if we do this well, I think over the next five years or so, in this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company," Zuckerberg said.

The Facebook boss added that the metaverse will be an embodiment of the internet where users can actually be in contents rather than just view them. Over the years, Facebook has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in virtual reality and augmented reality, to develop hardware such as the company's Oculus VR headsets that work on AR glasses and wristband technologies. The company has also purchased a bevy of VR gaming studios including BigBox VR. It currently has about 10,000 employees working in its virtual reality unit, according to a March report.

The concept of Facebook's metaverse is one that big technology companies have been developing. More tech companies are beginning to discuss this matter and the possibility of metaverse being a good replacement for smartphones and the mobile internet. These technologists consider a metaverse as some form of digital or virtual world where users can gather to interact, socialize, and work.

"I believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet, and creating this product group is the next step in our journey to help build it," Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post on Monday.

The metaverse technology is similar to the virtual reality and augmented reality technologies being developed by Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. A closely related technology to Facebook's metaverse is Roblox, a kids game whose parent company is worth $44 billion.