Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg want external help building the metaverse for its future development, particularly with the network needed for the virtual world. Meta, formerly Facebook, previously said that it would develop the metaverse, and it did so without any help from other companies until it announced that it would stop the development of its AR/VR for the new platform.
Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has shifted its long-term strategy away from its social media apps to focus on the metaverse, a virtual world where people wearing augmented/virtual reality headsets can talk to each others’ avatars, play games, hold meetings, and otherwise engage in social activities.
That’s created a lot of questions, such as what this means for a company that has been focused on social media for nearly two decades, whether Meta will be able to achieve its new goal of building a metaverse future, and what that future will look like for the billions of people who use Meta’s products every day.
The metaverse needs help, and it requires a new network that will help make it available to many users for when it releases to the public when it is ready. According to a report, Meta is asking for help, and the company brought this up at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, to which it announced a partner bid for the metaverse.
Zuckerberg said, “To reflect who we are and the future we hope to build, I’m proud to share that our company is now Meta.” Now, at MWC (Mobile World Congress) 2022 the Facebook founder gave a clarion call inviting companies to build the metaverse together.”
He further said, “Today, we’re at the start of the next transition as we build for the metaverse. But creating a true sense of presence in virtual worlds delivered to smart glasses and VR headsets will require massive advances in connectivity. Bigger than any of the step changes we’ve seen before.”
Zuckerberg’s message was expanded by Meta’s VP of Connectivity Dan Rabinovitsj, who in a blog post stressed on the fact that developing metaverse would require a global effort. “No single company, or industry, can do this alone. Creating the metaverse will require a global effort and we invite partners to collaborate with us on this new journey,” he wrote in a blog post.
Rabinovitsj said that the metaverse will reach a ‘billion people around the world, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support millions of jobs for creators and developers’.
However, delivering such an experience to people across the globe would require innovations in a variety of fields including hybrid local and remote real-time rendering, video compression, edge computing, and cross-layer visibility, spectrum advocacy, work on metaverse readiness of future connectivity, cellular standards, network optimisations, and improved latency between devices and within radio access networks (RANs) among other things.
