“The best way to understand the metaverse is to experience it yourself,” Zuckerberg added, though adding “it doesn’t fully exist yet”.

Still, Zuckerberg said, Facebook rolled out two of its metaverse projects in beta last year: Horizon World, which allows users to invite friends over into their digital world, and Horizon Workrooms, which does the same in professional settings. He also said Facebook plans to further explore NFTs and crypto to help facilitate media that can be represented digitally, and is working on gaming applications.

Facebook announced its name change amid ongoing regulatory and PR challenges. Those include a series of recent reports based on documents leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen that exposed toxic business practices and internal knowledge of its longterm negative public health impact.

The revelations are just the latest struggle for the embattled company, which has in recent years been served with a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), was the subject of numerous congressional hearings, and in 2019 was fined $5bn by the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 for “deceiving” users.

Critics of the platform contended on Thursday that the metaverse project is a distraction from the company’s PR crisis, and that the company risks making the same mistakes as it has in the past.

“The fact that Zuckerberg has set his sights firmly on the so-called ‘metaverse’ while societies all over the world are scrambling to alleviate the myriad harms caused by his platforms just goes to show how out of touch Facebook is with real people,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

https://worldtopnewsng.com/breaking-facebook-changes-name-to-meta/