*Facebook has changed its name to Meta, the company announced on Thursday.
“Today we are seen as a social media company, but in our DNA we are a company that builds technology to connect people, and the metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking was when we got started,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
The company’s stock ticker will change from FB to MVRS effective Dec. 1, as reported by CNBC.
Zuckerberg told The Verge in July that he wanted Facebook to become a “metaverse company.”
READ MORE: Facebook to Rebrand with New Name and Focus on ‘Metaverse’
The “metaverse” refers to the use of virtual reality devices to tap into the internet via a virtual space.
“You can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it. And you feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing, for example, or different types of fitness,” he told the outlet.
“I think a lot of people, when they think about the metaverse, they think about just virtual reality — which I think is going to be an important part of that. And that’s clearly a part that we’re very invested in, because it’s the technology that delivers the clearest form of presence,” he continued. “But the metaverse isn’t just virtual reality. It’s going to be accessible across all of our different computing platforms; VR and AR, but also PC, and also mobile devices and game consoles. Speaking of which, a lot of people also think about the metaverse as primarily something that’s about gaming. And I think entertainment is clearly going to be a big part of it, but I don’t think that this is just gaming.”
The company reportedly intends to add augmented and virtual reality to the platform in the coming years.
“Our hope is that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter on Thursday.
“We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet,” Zuckerberg said.
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