The ultimate dream of building these digital social experiences is actually being able to make it so that people can feel they are there together and doing something together.
— Mark Zuckerberg
The last months in the crypto world have been all about the metaverse. Paris Hilton performed in a metaverse festival held in Decentraland, a 3D virtual society powered by Ethereum blockchain. In November, SoftBank, an investment fund, led a $93 million round in The Sandbox, another successful metaverse platform. After The Sandbox announced they were opening the alpha version of the game on 29th November, their native token (SAND) increased its price by 6x over the following 30 days with a 3.1B USD market cap as of today.
Top tech companies have also positioned themselves in the metaverse world. Microsoft Teams has entered the metaverse race exploring new ways of online collaboration with 3D avatars and immersive meetings. Facebook announced during their last annual conference that they were radically changing the company's brand and strategy in the transition towards Meta. During the presentation, they explained that their vision on the future of digital experiences involves augmented reality, virtual reality and the metaverse.
In today’s article, we’ll find out Mark Zuckerberg’s definition of the metaverse directly from Facebook’s DNA. We’ll cover the following points:
What exactly is the metaverse?
The FB history: social media, AR & VR
Why Meta(verse)? The role of interoperability
What exactly is the metaverse?
If you have seen last Meta’s Connect conference, you might have a biased opinion about what the metaverse is going to be: an immersive parallel world, full of virtual reality, with humanoid avatars and holograms. However, metaverse experts have shown their disagreement about this definition and offer an alternative point of view.
Cathy Hackl wrote in Defining The Metaverse Today that, while an exact definition is not easy, the term will not be defined by one single person or company, it will be defined by many, and it will evolve. In Deconstructing Facebook’s metaverse, the Scandinavian MIND asked the founders of two metaverse companies for their definition of metaverse:
👉 In simple terms it is a digital social environment. The advanced version is a persistent parallel virtual world with its own economic system. I think there will be multiple metaverses where we can go hang out, learn, shop, work, and play and I am looking forward to more blending of virtual and physical so we don’t have to be either-or.
— Karinna Nobbs (co-founder and CXO of The Dematerialised)
Nobbs highlights a metaverse has three principal components:
Digital social environment: people interacting with each other on the Internet.
Persistent virtual world: it never "resets", "pauses", or "terminates", but rather continues endlessly.
Virtual economic system: each metaverse will have its own virtual economy for real lucrative benefits.
👉 The metaverse is a creative, expansive place with endless possibilities. It’s a seamless transition between apps and workspaces that will give us superpowers by working as a spectrum of realities that we can slide between. Ultimately, it is the internet in 3D.
The metaverse will democratise training, education and information-sharing and its accessibility will have a tremendously positive impact on everything from work and everyday chores to socialising, concerts and sports. Just imagine being hospitalised, elderly or otherwise limited in mobility, but still having the opportunity to see friends, visit museums, go shopping, or similar. Further, it’s going to be built in AR/VR and using AI — these emerging technologies will create jobs we couldn’t even imagine 10 or 20 years ago.
—Emma Ridderstad (Co-founder and CEO of Warpin Media)
Ridderstad envisions the metaverse as a creative space with infinite new ways of social interactions that can radically change how we live, work, and access information.
This long-term vision was magnificently shown by Mark Zuckerberg —as we will see in the next sections— during an informal interview with the entrepreneur and podcaster Gary Vee, explaining how the metaverse naturally fits in Facebook's DNA with more immersive experiences.
The FB history: social media, AR & VR
The metaverse is the next frontier in social connection.
— Mark Zuckerberg
Mark starts the conversation by mentioning Facebook is mostly known as a social media company. Nevertheless, he says Facebook is, in essence,a tech company that builds technology to help people connect and that has always been part of the company's DNA. He stated that “technology has given humans the power to express ourselves and experience the world with ever greater richness”.
Back in 2004, Facebook's founder launched the company from his dorm room, connecting Harvard students, and later expanded worldwide through network effects thanks to computers. In the last decade, mobile phones have overtaken computers as the most widely used device to access the Internet. Between 2012 and 2014, FB started investing in other social applications to make communication more visual and real-time, such as Instagram and Whatsapp, acquired for 19B and 1B USD respectively.
This turn towards the metaverse is not the first time Zuckerberg has surprisingly changed strategy. Seven years ago, FB decided to explore new areas where phones had limitations by acquiring Oculus, a company that builds virtual reality devices:
Mark explains why they acquired Oculus:
👉 We started with communicating by text in computers, then photos when the cameras in phones improved, making communications much more visual. And recently, as connections got faster, video has become the main way that we experience content. [...] What about after the video? We believe the next platforms will have more immersive experiences with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR).
In VR, the headsets completely take over your vision to give you the impression that you're somewhere else: the outside world is replaced with a virtual one. Mark says successful virtual reality apps are already happening in games, social media and fitness:
On the other hand, AR is much more promising but harder to implement due to a new optical stack. Instead of headsets, you’ll use glasses (or contact lenses) and your vision won’t be replaced but augmented. This technology is designed for free movement while projecting virtual images over whatever you look at. Augmented reality displays can offer something as simple as a data overlay that shows the time, to something as complicated as holograms floating in the middle of a room:
Why Meta(verse)? The role of interoperability
We believe metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet
— Mark Zuckerberg
In October 2021, the parent company of Facebook decided to change its name to Meta to reflect its shift in strategy towards the technological and social construction of the metaverse. As Gary Vee pointed out, Facebook is well-known for effectively understanding where the current people’s attention is —i.e. where the hype is— and how to quickly adapt their vision and focus for new opportunities and technologies. So why did Facebook change to Meta?
Mark said although Meta’s core is still social media, the pandemic has shown an increasing interest in building platforms and experiences that deliver a sense of presence: being there with another person. According to Meta, they have technical limitations in developing these new ways of digital real-time social experiences on phones. First, the hardware is not capable of creating these immersive VR and AR experiences and second, they do not own the mobile platforms (both software and hardware). —Screens can’t convey the full range of human expression and connection—, he said.
The web3 --the Internet on the blockchain-- will open a new revolution in social communication and they see a clear opportunity to build the next generation of platforms and apps around the metaverse. Thanks to VR and AR, Mark believes you will be able to do almost anything you can imagine: get together with friends and family, work, learn, shop, play, and create entirely new types of social interactions we cannot imagine today.
In the metaverse, you will be able to feel present like you are right there with people. For instance, when you send your parents a video of their grandchildren, they’ll feel like they are in the moment with you, not peering through a little window. In short, experiences are gonna be more natural and vivid, according to Zuckerberg.
In regard to the social and technological opportunities, Zuckerberg believes that these new immersive experiences will pivot around avatars, clothing, friends, home space, and virtual goods. Besides, Mark Zuckerberg thinks the role of interoperability is the most promising metaverse feature. Interoperability allows users to own one asset, which they can then use in multiple locations --e.g. in other webpages--. In a fully open and interoperable metaverse, users can take their NFTs (their digital identity) and go anywhere.
The metaverse also creates new types of commerce located at the intersection between social expression and digital identity by allowing the user to seamlessly interact with many different players and on different platforms. The blockchain technology and the crypto economics are validating that social experiences with virtual economies can be really profitable for both users and startups. However, Mark says that many crypto experiences are still very young, but not broken. The way he sees it, crypto is not as great yet as it will be in the future.
Closing Up
It is important to understand Mark's words to see the potential that metaverses will have during this new technological revolution that is the blockchain. And it's not just me saying it, Goldman Sachs is.
In a world where the crypto press and general opinion has focused on criticizing the highly speculative nature of NFTs, the biggest experts of metaverses defend that the real value is in the creation of these virtual economies of social nature thanks to the interoperability and decentralized custody that blockchain technology gives.
Before building the metaverse, we should study the "old-school metaverses", metaverses of the pre-blockchain era such as Second Life, Habbo or Roblox. In the next article, we'll dig into the fascinating world of virtual worlds.