“You’ll be able to do almost anything”: 5 inspirational (and frightening) quotes by Mark Zuckerberg

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg does not believe the meta-universe is something that one company can build or manage. Instead, it is a collaborative movement that must consider the interests of developers and creator communities for overall success. Zuckerberg is so optimistic that he intends to turn Facebook from a social media company into a metaverse in the coming years. In the fall of 2021, the company was renamed Meta.

Facebook/Meta also did not name a specific figure but did not refute one analyst’s estimate that the company is spending about $5 billion a year to develop its metaverse. And now it seems it might be even more.

According to the company’s latest second-quarter report, its metaverse division, Reality Labs, reported earnings of $452 million for the quarter, down from $695 million in the first quarter. The division posted a $2.8 billion loss in the second quarter of 2022. And more bad news: starting August 1, the Meta Quest 2 virtual reality headset will go up by $100 in retail. The company is also going to raise the price of peripheral devices.

So, what is metaverse?

Facebook/Meta CEO sees metaverse as an immersive Internet experience that allows you to replace or supplement reality with computer simulations that strive to be as realistic as possible. 

“You can think about the metaverse as an embodied internet where instead of just viewing content — you are in it,” Zuckerberg once explained.

He also describes it as “a persistent, synchronous environment” that will “be accessible across all of our different computing platforms; VR and AR, but also PC, and mobile devices and game consoles.”

Some metaverses already exist. However, they are not immersive in the complete sense of the word. We are still a few years away (or maybe more) from having full-fledged technology.

For example, a Metaverse Standards Forum already includes Meta, Adobe, Microsoft, Nvidia, Epic Games, Ikea, Qualcomm, Sony, the XR Association, SDOs, The Khronos Group, World Wide Web Consortium, and Open Geospatial Consortium.

What Mark Zuckerberg has to say about the metaverse

“We’re a company that focuses on connecting people. While most other tech companies focus on how people interact with technology, we focus on building technology so people can interact with each other.”

“I think digital goods and creators are just going to be huge… in terms of people expressing themselves through their avatars, through digital clothing, through digital goods, the apps that they have, that they bring with them from place to place. A lot of the metaverse experience is going to be around being able to teleport from one experience to another. So being able to basically have your digital goods and your inventory and bring them from place to place, that’s going to be a big investment that people make.”

“The metaverse is not a single product or an operating system. It isn’t a single piece of cloth but a patchwork quilt. There won’t be a Meta-run metaverse, just as there isn’t a ‘Microsoft internet’ or ‘Google internet’ today. It won’t be ownable, just as today’s internet isn’t.”

“We believe the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile internet. We’ll be able to feel present — like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are.”

“In the metaverse, you’ll be able to do almost anything you can imagine — get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create — as well as completely new experiences that don’t really fit how we think about computers or phones today.”