Saturday, June 21, 2025

October 29, 2021

Check Out These Highlights From Facebook’s New Meta Universe Demo [Videos]

Facebook's name change announcement came with a couple of demos showing off what the company imagines the future will look like.

[imagesource: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images]

The news that Mark Zuckerberg would be changing Facebook’s name (the company, not the social media site) came amidst some pretty damning claims from a whistleblower, criticism from netizens, and a general PR crisis like never before.

But good old Zuck went ahead anyway and announced the name change yesterday (October 28).

Facebook (again, the company) shall now be referred to as Meta, encompassing Facebook (the site), Instagram, WhatsApp, and virtual reality brand Oculus as well.

The company is transitioning into a “metaverse company”, with the tech giant saying, “Meta is helping to build the metaverse, a place where we’ll play and connect in 3D. Welcome to the next chapter of social connection.”

The metaverse is essentially a virtual reality, which The Guardian explains:

The metaverse is where the physical and digital worlds come together. It is a space where digital representations of people – avatars – interact at work and play, meeting in their office, going to concerts and even trying on clothes.

The idea is to enter the metaverse via Facebook’s Oculus VR headsets and interact with the world around you with a digital world layered on top.

Think of Pokémon Go or Facebook’s (sorry, Meta’s) recent smart glasses collab with Ray-Ban.

The name change announcement also came with a demo showing off what the company imagines the future of computing will look like.

The Verge reckons that these demos were actually pretty interesting, even “amid all the fluff”:

During the presentation, Meta showed off the work it’s been doing on its Codec Avatars to give users better control over their eyes, facial expressions, hairstyles, and appearance.

The company also showed off the ability to simulate how the avatar’s hair and skin could react to different lighting conditions and environments and even how it was working on interactive clothing… [and] its real-time environment rendering, which it said would eventually be a place for you to use your avatar to interact with others.

Here’s some very bad acting from Zuck with a video showcasing what the metaverse is capable of:

Umm, cool?

Here’s a longer look at what’s in store, with everything you need to know about the metaverse:

As you can imagine, there was much mockery:

Some of it gets quite dark, with The Daily Show tweaking the presentation video with a superimposition of the January 6 Capitol riots and the 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist march.

Both events were organised largely using Facebook’s platform:

New York progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t hold back in her disapproval either:

Putting the motives of the rebrand aside, it’s also upsetting how we can’t simply say “that’s so meta” any longer.

Now Meta is something completely different, and perhaps, not so self-aware.

[sources:verge&guardian]