Convergencia Research, Consultoría especializada en Latinoamérica y Caribe
Monday, November 01, 2021

Facebook: the bet on virtual reality and the harsh reality to overcome

With its sights set on VR and AR, Meta will allocate huge financial resources to fund its investigations. From a technology viewpoint, the proposals are promising. But critical views suggest that the corporate structure will remain the same.

Nothing better than virtual reality to escape from the harsh real reality. That could have been the slogan behind the decision to change the name of Facebook - the holding company - to Meta, a diffuse name that without the "verse" that continued it in its original version could lead to confusion.

For Mark Zuckerberg there is no buzz. Meta, he assured on Thursday in the conference he gave when announcing the name change, reflects the investment made in the metaverse, the shared virtual environment that in Zuckerberg's bet will be the successor to mobile Internet.

"Right now, our brand is so closely tied to a product that it cannot possibly represent everything we are doing today, and much less in the future", said the CEO.

But it is impossible to demarcate the decision from what has been the last period of Facebook, marked by serious unresolved problems in its main product, the social network of the same name. Facebook supports judicial, regulatory and legislative investigations in the United States, its image is in decline among the public in that country, advertisers are beginning to show a certain reluctance to continue advertising and management is heavy when responding to the challenges posed by new social contact options.

Plans to gradually remove Facebook's name even from products like the video calling device Portal show the company is eager to prevent this unprecedented scrutiny from damaging the rest of its businesses, Prashant Malaviya, marketing professor at McDonough Business School of Georgetown University, told Reuters. "Without a doubt, (the name Facebook) is definitely corrupted and toxic", he said.

The separation of Facebook from other products and technologies will be such that, over time, users will not need to use Facebook (social network) to use the other services of the company.

Meta's heart. Zuckerberg chose one of the meanings of the Greek origin word, meta, to give sense to his company. "It means beyond, it symbolizes that there is always more to build", he said. In that sense, the permanent changes stopped at the door of the company since its CEO anticipated that he does not foresee changes in the corporate structure. This despite the fact that according to Frances Haugen, the former executive who denounced the malpractices within the company, that same structure is designed not to interfere in decisions that prioritize income over ethics.

However, Facebook's investments have been strong in augmented reality (AR) and virtual (VR), the two pillars on which the new development path of the firm is based. Reality Labs, Facebook's hardware division and responsible for AR and VR efforts, will become a separate unit and the planned investment therein will reduce this year's total operating profit by about US$10 billion.

In addition, within Reality Labs the company created a product team focused on the metaverse. That unit has plans to hire 10,000 technicians in Europe over the next five years to work on the effort.

The lines of work of Reality Labs will point to the improvement of the Oculus virtual reality helmets, whose brand would change. It will also deepen the development of smart glasses deployed with Ray-Ban. Another tour will be that of Horizon Home, whereby people can invite others to a virtual version of their home.

Perhaps Meta is one of the firms with the greatest financial backing to experiment with products and services related to AR and VR. The doubts do not come from the promising possibilities that these technologies offer to everyday life. Rather, they have to do with the fact that, from Zuckerberg downward, the contested real reality of the new holding company will remain the same.

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