Into the Metaverse: Facebook Reality Labs Forms a New Product Team

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wasted no time putting his vision of the metaverse onto the fast track. Casey Newton of The Verge reported last week that Zuckerberg said during a presentation to employees at the end of June that he envisioned Facebook moving beyond connected social applications and hardware and into a “maximalist, interconnected set of experiences” known as the metaverse. Facebook Reality Labs head Andrew Bosworth used a Facebook post late Monday to introduce the company’s new Metaverse product group, which will be part of his division. The group will be led by Instagram vice president of product Vishal Shah, with Facebook Gaming vice president Vivek Sharma tapped to lead the Horizon team and Oculus veteran and Facebook Gaming vp of play Jason Rubin leading the content team. Bosworth added that Sharma and Rubin will continue to work with Facebook Gaming partners on expanding the size and capabilities of the social network’s gaming platforms. He wrote in his post, “The metaverse is already here as a collection of digital worlds, each with its own physics to determine what’s possible within them. The defining quality of the metaverse will be presence—the feeling of really being there with people—and Facebook Reality Labs has been focused on building products that deliver presence across digital spaces for years. Today, Portal and Oculus can teleport you into a room with another person, regardless of physical distance, or to new virtual worlds and experiences. But to achieve our full vision of the metaverse, we also need to build the connective tissue between these spaces—so you can remove the limitations of physics and move between them with the same ease as moving from one room in your home to the next.” Zuckerberg expanded on his vision in an interview with Newton last week, saying, “The metaverse is a vision that spans many companies—the whole industry. You can think about it as the successor to the mobile internet. And it’s certainly not something that any one company is going to build, but I think a big part of our next chapter is going to hopefully be contributing to building that, in partnership with a lot of other companies and creators and developers. But you can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness.” He later added, “It just touches a lot of the biggest themes that we’re working on. Think about things like community and creators as one, or digital commerce as a second, or building out the next set of computing platforms, like virtual and augmented reality, to give people that sense of presence. I think all of these different initiatives that we have at Facebook today will basically ladder up together to contribute to helping to build this metaverse vision.”

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Into the Metaverse: Facebook Reality Labs Forms a New Product Team

It will be led by Instagram’s Vishal Shah

David Cohen

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David Cohen