What’s so unique about Meta? Mixing Reality With An Alphabet Soup

Alphabet today is “mostly a collection of companies”, the largest being Google. Announcing the results for the quarter ended September 30, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, said: “Five years ago, I laid out my vision to become an AI-first company. This quarter’s results show how our investments have helped us.” enabling us to create more useful products for people and our partners…”

When Zuckerberg made his meta announcement on October 28, he said, among other things, “Our mission is the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and their brands aren’t changing either. We are still the company that designs technology around people…” while Meta Platforms, Inc. (FB)’s corporate structure will not change, the company plans to report on two operating segments — Family of Apps and Reality Labs — beginning with fourth quarter 2021 results. .

However, unlike Page, Zuckerberg made no reference in his speech to “a cleaner and more accountable” company, despite the many legal and privacy entanglements the company is embroiled in, and continues to grapple with in the US, EU. Is. and other parts of the world. For example, Facebook’s dispute with whistleblower Frances Hogen, a former data scientist at Facebook, continues in US courts. He only said, “… this period has also been humbling because as a company we are as big as we are, we have also learned what to build on other platforms. Living by their rules has deeply shaped my thoughts.” .Tech Industry…”

Even though the ‘meta’ name would change the fortunes of Facebook, which is currently valued at just over $900 billion, the fact remains that the company is in need of a perception change – from the world’s largest social networking site to one of the future. The way Google did it with DeepMind.

Zuckerberg wants the new identity to be “metaverse-first, not Facebook-first” (remember, Google underpins AI-first, and meta can’t function without AI). This, he explained, means that over time you will no longer need a Facebook account to use the company’s other products and services. This simply means users can be on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or soon to be surpassed with Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse entity ‘Meta’. According to Statista, during the first quarter of 2021, Facebook said 3.51 billion people were using at least one of its core products (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger) every month.

It’s the same way individuals and businesses can do a typical Zen search and leverage advertising with Google, while investors can deal with an expensive Google parent called ‘Alphabet’, which is now valued at $1.97 trillion.

For now, though, the Meta brand is a work in progress. According to Zuckerberg, the metaverse includes both social experience and the technology of the future. Going forward, Zuckerberg expects the Metaverse to “reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers”.

But how unique is the Metaverse to Facebook?

To begin with, it is not. Several technology firms, including Microsoft, Nvidia and Fortnite maker Epic Games, have been talking about their own visions of the metaverse for quite some time. In fact, the term is borrowed from Neil Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, in which the concept was used to describe a new type of internet with virtual reality (VR).

And if you’re a science-fiction movie buff, you’ll remember that Tom Cruise tackled interactive billboards and iris-triggered direct marketing in the film Minority Report, released almost 19 years ago, or Marvel Comics in the Tony Stark movie He was like a superhero. Iron Man is going a step further with his artificial intelligence (AI) partner Jarvis (simply a very intelligent system), who provides him with holograms, computers, and all the information he needs in Stark’s Iron Man suit as well.

Pokémon Go is a free location-based augmented reality (AR) mobile game for iOS and Android smartphone users that mixes online reality with the real world. It allows players to use the GPS (Global Positioning System) and Google Maps on their smartphones to look for Pokestops at places such as public art installations, historical markers, and monuments, where they can collect Poke Balls and other objects. can. And like Pokestops, gyms can be found in real places in the world—all without users needing a virtual reality (VR) headset, which indicates that AR technology is coming of age.

You might remember Second Life, which can be described as a different kind of metaverse, within or outside the Internet. Developed by San Francisco-based Lyndon Labs in 2003, this multi-player world became a whimsical digital one when it allowed users to create their own digital 3D avatars, socialize with others, play games, and explore multiple worlds called The Sims. . While Facebook’s Metaverse is a VR and augmented reality (mixed reality that mixes VR and AR with the real world) platform, Second Life is a virtual online world that can be accessed on a PC. It also has a thriving marketplace where users can buy and sell goods, property and services using a virtual currency called the Linden Dollar. Second Life’s user base reached a record high of 1.1 million monthly active users in 2013 and is believed to currently have 900,000 active users.

Magic Leap, founded by Ronnie Abovitz in 2010, went a step further. It was seen as one of the most promising companies in the field of mixed reality. Abovitz managed to create and maintain the buzz about Magic Leap headsets for years, without actually launching a product to market. In 2018, US telco AT&T acquired a stake in the company, and the same year the first Magic Leap One headset was launched in AT&T stores.

However, Magic Leap One failed to live up to the hype and was far from the tall promises made in many of its performances. Palmer Luckey, best known as the founder of Oculus VR and the designer of the Oculus Rift (both now owned by Facebook or Meta), in a blog post titled ‘.Magic Leap is a sad pile’, calling it a lucrative promotional vehicle that no one can use in a meaningful way. Abovitz eventually stepped down in 2020 and former Microsoft executive Peggy Johnson was appointed CEO. In October 2021, Magic Leap raised $500 million to take the total investment to $3.5 billion and announced that its next AR headset, the Magic Leap 2, would launch in 2022.

The craze for Second Life and Pokémon Go has certainly waned over time, but the fact remains that technology companies like Microsoft with their HoloLens, and US-based start-up Magic Leap Inc. VR with the real world to help users and businesses deal with so-called “mixed” reality (MR) or “mixed” reality concepts. The belief is that these technologies have the potential to become the next big computing platform.

While VR is entirely about a world created on a computer or online, AR still deals with the real world and contains elements of the virtual world, which resemble layers of information. AR technology was conceived by Evan Sutherland, who designed the first AR system in 1968, but the technology is only now blooming with customized applications in industrial automation, theme parks, sports television, military displays, and online marketing.

Jaron Lanier, an American author, computer scientist, and composer of classical music, is credited with popularizing the term AR. He and Thomas G. Zimmerman left the gaming firm Atari in 1985 and founded VPL Research Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves.

Mixed Reality or MR, as the name suggests, mixes both realities in a bid to capture the best of both worlds.

To be fair, Zuckerberg did say in his note that the Metaverse would be a collective project that would transcend a single company and that it would be built by people around the world, and open to all.

In September, Facebook itself introduced Ray-Ban Stories – smart glasses that can capture photos and videos, listen to music or take phone calls. Created in partnership with Facebook and EssilorLuxottica, Ray-Ban Stories is already available in some countries (but not in India). A month later, Facebook announced a $10 million creator fund to “encourage more people to join us as we continue to roll out Horizon in beta”. Facebook is a place to explore, play and create with others in Horizon VR. In addition, the Codec Life-Like incarnation of Facebook Reality Labs is another ongoing research project.

Microsoft is also betting big on its MR holographic computer, which it calls the HoloLens. HoloLens has sensors that allow you to use your gaze to move the cursor to select a hologram. You can use gestures to open apps, select and resize items, and drag and drop holograms, and use voice commands to navigate, select, open, command and control apps . You can also talk directly to personal digital assistant Cortana.

Indian companies have their own brush with mixed reality. In his 2014 campaign, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi used holographic technology, such as the 3D Life of London-based Musion, to address audiences at 128 locations across India.

Mumbai-based VR startup Tesseract, in which Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio holds a majority stake, is promising a mixed reality future with its Jio Glass, Quark camera, Holoboard headset and Jio Fiber. It has promising applications for both consumption and enterprises. For example, you can watch a football match on a VR headset that streams the match live and offers interesting statistics with the help of Augmented Reality (AR). Similarly, a Hyderabad-based mixed reality startup called Imaginet enables cross-device communication on VR and AR wearables for enterprise collaboration in the industrial sector.

All of these examples underscore how the shadows are coming from sci-fi movies like Mixed Reality or MR Blade Runner 2049, where Officer K. Develops a relationship with his AI hologram partner Joey. This indicates why MR is poised to become the next big computing platform.

However, will this help Facebook move beyond its past with Meta? Or will adding meta to Apple, Amazon, Alphabet or Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Tesla group only add more confusion to the alphabet soup?