Facebook sets up a new team to work on the “metaverse”

July 26 (Reuters) – Facebook is creating a product team to work on the “metaverse,” a digital world where people can move between different devices and communicate in a virtual environment, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday.

The team will be part of the company’s virtual reality organization, group leader Andrew Bosworth said in a Facebook post.

“You can think of the metaverse as an embodied Internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are there,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge in an interview last week.

Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has invested heavily in virtual reality and augmented reality, developing hardware like its Oculus VR headsets and working on AR glasses and wristband technologies.

It has also purchased a host of VR game studios, including BigBox VR. It has around 10,000 employees working on virtual reality, The Information reported in March.

Zuckerberg said he thinks it makes sense to invest deeply in shaping what he is betting will be the next big computing platform.

“I think the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile Internet, and the creation of this product group is the next step in our journey to help build it,” he said in his Facebook post on Monday.

He told The Verge: “If we do it right, I think over the next five years or so… we’ll actually go from people who see us primarily as a social media company to a metaverse company.”

Reporting by Elizabeth Culliford; edited by Richard Pullin

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