Meta, the ex-Facebook, will spend US $ 10 billion to lay the groundwork for an immersive virtual universe called Metaverse. And that’s just one of the new products that will be coming out in the next few years from its Reality Labs. On the menu: smart watch, connected speaker, augmented reality glasses… lark!
The Portal connected screen and connected glasses made in conjunction with the Ray Ban brand are just the beginning, said in an exclusive interview with The duty Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, who, after 15 years at Facebook, will reach the key position of Chief Technology Officer by 2022 at … Meta, the name chosen by the Californian company to signify its future development.
“Meta, that’s it: we’ll be more than a social network. On the hardware side, we make a lot of prototypes to test some very specific functions and when such a prototype gets quite sophisticated, we might put it on sale, ”he says. The next big product is obviously a good fit: a mixed reality headset, called Project Cambria. It is expected next year.
Mixed reality is what you see when you wear a headset with cameras that can recreate a picture of the physical environment in front of you before your eyes, and when you add fully virtual digital content to it. This definition also applies to the “metaverse”, a word repeated often last Thursday by the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, to indicate where he wanted to lead his company.
Above all, we’re relying on our faith that the metaverse will eventually be bigger than the web is today.
“It will be a whole ecosystem. We will trade there, we will be able to exchange items virtually, it will be a place where workers can go to be more productive. And it will be very different from what we currently do with a telephone. The metaverse is the next big growth curve for tech. “
This virtual reality will also apparently help to keep in shape: Facebook just announced at the end of the day Friday the acquisition of the publisher of the subscription formatting application Supernatural to better integrate it into its virtual platform.
A universe to build … or to acquire
Other digital environments already exist: Microsoft and its HoloLens glasses are very close to what is happening in Meta’s Reality Labs. If we consider open video game platforms as Roblox and Fortnite (Epic Games), the list can go on and on.
But the metaverse is neither a game nor a business app. What’s this ? “It’s an immersive environment that doesn’t need to be explored from a virtual reality headset, but is much richer and more immersive if it is. It brings together in one place all of these little worlds created by each of the everyday apps you use right now separately, ”says Andrew Bosworth.
“It is the evolution of the social network towards a virtual world where the avatar of the users is not any more only a name and a photo. He is a three-dimensional character who can explore a physical environment and who can interact with other people or with companies, ”adds Nadia Seraiocco, lecturer at UQAM’s Media School and technology specialist. digital.
What Zuckerberg wants to create is reminiscent of Second Life, according to her, a virtual world that had its heyday between 2003 and 2013. The concept had attracted many companies. The Canadian Telus had its own store in Second Life, where it offered remote customer service.
Its best days are far behind, but Second Life still exists… Besides, if Meta fails to take off its own digital universe, it can always try to acquire one of its rival environments, adds Mme Seraiocco. This is how Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 …
“Second Life is great technology that came into being too early,” says Andrew Bosworth. The future CTO of Meta does not see his own environment suffering the same fate, although Oculus headsets, at the moment, mostly attract the youngest video game enthusiasts.
“Yes, that’s right, we’re mostly relying on our faith that the metaverse will eventually be bigger than the web is now. Remember, a lot of technology in its early days looked like a toy, but that’s how we end up today with smartphones in our hands. “