Facebook Renames Itself Meta in Effort to Build Sci-Fi-Like Metaverse

Facebook is renaming itself Meta to reflect the company’s new priority on building a virtual reality world dubbed the metaverse.

“We are going to be metaverse first, not Facebook first,” Mark Zuckerberg said during a speech at the Facebook Connect event on Thursday.

Zuckerberg announced the new brand after talking up his company’s ambitious goal of creating a VR world similar to what’s depicted in the hit sci-fi book Ready Player One, where virtual reality becomes so good it dominates people’s lives, becoming a new way to live, work, and play.

“Our mission remains the same: It’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and our brands, they’re not changing either. And we are still the company that designs technology around people. But now we have a new North Star. To help bring the metaverse to life,” Zuckerberg said.

As a result, Zuckerberg is dropping Facebook as the name for the parent company. “Building our social media apps will always be an important focus for us. But right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we’re doing today, let alone in the future,” he added.

To underscore the company’s new focus, Zuckerberg prepared an elaborate one-hour keynote that relied on Hollywood-like special effects to depict how he hopes the metaverse will one day take shape in real life. According to him, the technology can improve to the point where VR experiences will feel close to real life.

:story: PCMag