Facebook to hire 10,000 in EU to work on metaverse

[Aiken_Drumn]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-58949867

Facebook is planning to hire 10,000 people in the European Union to develop a so-called metaverse.

A metaverse is an online world where people can game, work and communicate in a virtual environment, often using VR headsets. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been a leading voice on the concept. The announcement comes as Facebook deals with the fallout of a damaging scandal and faces increased calls for regulation to curb its influence.

"The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social, and economic opportunities. And Europeans will be shaping it right from the start," Facebook said in a blog post.

The new jobs being created over the next five years will include "highly specialised engineers". Investing in the EU offered many advantages, including access to a large consumer market, first-class universities and high-quality talent, Facebook said. Facebook has made building the metaverse one of its big priorities. Despite its history of buying up rivals, Facebook claims the metaverse "won't be built overnight by a single company" and has promised to collaborate. It recently invested $50m (£36.3m) in funding non-profit groups to help "build the metaverse responsibly", but it thinks the true metaverse idea will take another 10 to 15 years.

 

[amadeus]

The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social, and economic opportunities.

My finger has the potential of going up my bunghole, but that doesn't mean it's going to.

 

[Samson]

A metaverse is an online world where people can game, work and communicate in a virtual environment, often using VR headsets.

So the metaverse is the internet viewed through an oculus rift? I have only briefly used such a thing, and they are quite cool and I have thought of a few visualisation problems where they would help, but I do not see them as the be all and end all of the human/computer interface. Text on a flat surface takes a lot of beating, and has been perfected for over 5,000 years.

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

but that doesn't mean it's going to.

Now now, lets not get too hasty!

 

[MrCynical]

For all the hype they're trying to building about the "metaverse", there's and awful lot of vague handwaving about what use it is supposed to be, or even what it actually consists of. So far it seems to amount to a VR version of Second Life (also absurdly hyped at the time, and rapidly ended up irrelevant), which doesn't seem anything to get excited about.

 

[uppi]

Something like this has been the subject of countless science fiction stories. It has often been portrayed as an escape from the deteriorating real world. If it has only a fraction of a success as in the stories, it would be huge success. But of course those are just stories.

I could imagine an application as sort of a virtual meeting room to replace video calls. If you could map facial expressions from a video imagine to a 3D-Model, you could almost replicate a real meeting (how many real meeting you want to have is another discussion, though). There would be quite some ethical concerns with that, but I guess Facebook would not care to much.

 

[warpus]

I would much rather support open source metaverse implementations, and not anything like this.

 

[EnglishEdward]

Isn't it funny.

The minute the government, in this case the EU, starts getting serious about regulating i.e. heavily fining a US digital corporate.

It starts talking about creating thousands of jobs there.

Are they real OR is it just a stalling tactic?

 

[Sofista]

Am I the only one who thought that this is Second LIfe+VR?

 

[amadeus]

There’s nothing groundbreaking, Facebook is just gambling that an already existing technology is going to pick up steam... people are selective about how they want to change their virtual environs. How long have there been 3D movies, since the ‘50s? How about smell-o-vision?

I remember the hype around the “it” project, “it” was going to change everything! Five days until “it!” A revolution in human mobility!

“It” was the Segway, which revolutionized... mall security? How did we survive before that?

 

[warpus]

This whole "metaverse" thing does seem like something that a whole bunch of people seem to think is going to stick around. Facebook isn't the only group trying to get first mover advantage here. I saw an article about a blockchain based approach to building such a thing. I can't remember what that project is called and I can't find it, but a quick google-fu tells me that there might be multiple such projects in the works.

There is indeed nothing groundbreaking here per se, but VR tech is finally almost good enough for something like this.. not to mention the power of today's desktops, today's internet speeds, etc. If somebody wanted to build such a thing 10 or 20 years ago, they'd have failed, even if it was an easy thing to imagine.

This isn't a new sort of idea, it's been in science fiction novels for decades

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

I wonder how many still have the job?