Facebook, now named Meta, made very few announcements that would affect or even excite enterprise users of the company’s VR and AR tools and technology right now
Quick read
➨ Connect 2021 revealed Facebook’s new name would be Meta, to better reflect the company’s planned trajectory over the next decade as it invests billions of dollars in building the ‘metaverse’
➨ Most notably, the company revealed that it is working on a new VR and AR headset—just not one that anyone predicted
➨ Oculus plans to begin testing Quest for Business, a new suite of features it says are ‘designed for businesses, but which runs on the same consumer Quest 2 headset you can buy today’
The story
Connect 2021 yesterday revealed Facebook’s new name would be Meta, to better reflect the company’s planned trajectory over the next decade as it invests billions of dollars in building the ‘metaverse’.
But during his 90-minute keynote speech, Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues made very few announcements that would affect or even excite enterprise users of the company’s virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) tools and technology right now.
Chief among these was a promise that a Facebook account will not be needed to access Meta hardware, software and services in the future, a major complaint for businesses and professional users worried about privacy and data protection.
‘Successor to the mobile internet’
Dubbed the “successor to the mobile internet”, the metaverse was front and centre of this year’s Connect event, Facebook’s annual update on its VR and AR plans. Last year’s event gave us the fantastic-for-work-and-play Oculus Quest 2 at the knock-down price of $300.
Yesterday’s Connect, however, was Zuckerberg’s big pitch to the wider world about what kind of company Facebook intended to become over the next decade.
The Facebook founder and chief executive officer described and envisioned the next evolution of the internet, in which photorealistic avatars would meet in custom virtual spaces to socialise, work and play.