In October 2021, Facebook, a social media giant with 2.8 billion users, announced that it would change its name to Meta and focus on virtual reality and augmented reality in the future, which completely triggered the explosion of the metaverse concept.
Meta founder Zuckerberg said that he hopes to build Meta into a metaverse company in about five years, and the name change confirms Meta's ambition to bring All in metacosm.
But the feast for the metaverse was laid long before Meta acquired Oculus, and in 2019 Meta announced that Horizon would be a whole new social virtual world.
Subsequently, at the end of 2021, Horizon Worlds was officially opened as a meta-universe platform.
In early 2022, Zuckerberg promised to invest $10 billion a year in the metaverse over the next decade, and it is not difficult to see how much Meta attaches to the metaverse from such a huge investment.
Not only that, but last week Meta announced that it would suspend this year's F8 Developer Conference because it would devote more time to the metaverse.
So how exactly does Meta lay out the metaverse? What are the reasons behind the heavy bet on the metaverse?
When did Meta start laying out the metaverse?
In March 2014, Facebook, which had not yet changed its name, bought Oculus for $2 billion in cash and stock, when Zuckerberg said in an announcement that "mobile is the current platform, and the acquisition of Oculus is to prepare for tomorrow's platform." ”
After this huge acquisition, Meta underwent a series of upgrades to Oculus until September 2020, when the Oculus Quest 2 headset went public for $299, quickly igniting the market once launched.
Although the concept of metaversmonics was not yet popular at that time, it turned out that Zuckerberg's every step towards the metaverse was carefully paved.
In March 2021, Roblox launched the meta-universe concept on the New York Stock Exchange, and its market value once exceeded $48 billion. This metacosmic wave quickly swept across all walks of life around the world.
The sense of immersion emphasized by the metaverse needs to rely on the terminal device as a connection interface to achieve, and the VR track that Zuckerberg believes has a good development prospect has naturally become an important entrance to the metacosm.
Eventually, Facebook directly announced at Connect's annual general meeting that it would rename the company to Meta, and the plan of the social platform with a large number of users to lay out the metacosm was completely made public.
It's not just Facebook's parent company that changed its name, but its Oculus Quest VR headset product was officially renamed "Meta Quest" on January 27, in which Meta Quest also said that "change is sometimes not a bad thing, we want to better help build the metaverse, and the new name will make the process clearer."
At this point, Facebook has completely transformed from a social media platform to a metaverse concept company called Meta, and the current metaverse map of Meta is still exploring richer application areas, so what tracks does Meta bet on?
What directions does Meta currently bet on the metaverse?
Meta may not be the first tech company in the world to focus on the metaverse track, but it is undoubtedly a forerunner who has made a desperate investment in the metaverse.
However, the All in Metaverse is not just a name change, and what aspects of meta metaverse are currently being acted upon, we will break it down below.
Bet hardware tracks with a lot of money
The early stages of any industry are inseparable from the construction of infrastructure, as the user interface and immersive experience of the metaverse "four kongs", the development of hardware provides the necessary infrastructure for the realization of the metacosmity ("four kongs" refers to what we often call "BAND", that is, blockchain technology, games, networks, and displays).
The hardware track of the current metacosm is mainly divided into two parts: AR glasses and VR headsets, and its consumer groups are slightly different. AR glasses have become the darling of industrial enterprises with their advantages in training and remote guidance.
The VR headset has become the first choice of ordinary consumers with its colorful and entertaining applications.
Although the current VR headset has caused public concern to a certain extent due to personal privacy data leakage, security protection and other aspects, it cannot slow down the pace of continuous development of the VR headset market.
According to IDC's latest report released in March, global AR/VR headset shipments reached 11.23 million units in 2021, an increase of 92.1% year-on-year, while Meta's Oculus market share reached a staggering 80%.
As a market leader, Meta's investment in the hardware track can be said to be a thousand dollars.
In 2014, Meta acquired Oculus, followed by CTRL-labs, a startup at AR Glasses Track, for $78 million in the same year, and more recently, Meta acquired Within, the developer behind the VR fitness app Supernatural, for more than $400 million.
Moreover, in the case of XR in the future, Meta is not satisfied with the achievements brought by Oculus Quest, but actively explores new areas.
In March, Meta poached Rune Jensen, director of hardware engineering at Microsoft's AR Glasses HoloLens, for twice as much to put him in charge of cutting-edge AR/VR technology research and prototype device development.
But these investments are only the tip of the iceberg, the Meta AR/VR business group Reality Labs only invested more than $12 billion in 2021, it can be said that Meta has invested a lot of money and energy in hardware.
Try to build a metaverse social platform
In addition to making efforts in the hardware track, as the parent company of traditional social media Facebook, Instagram and Whatapps, Meta, with a large user base, has undoubtedly spared no effort in building a meta-universe social platform.
In December 2021, Meta officially opened horizon, a VR social platform where users can create avatars and interact with other users. While the avatars of users in Horizon are only the upper half of their bodies, more than 300,000 people have participated since its launch.
Horizon actually consists of Horizon Worlds, Horizon Venues, Horizon Workrooms, and Horizon Home, which is still under development.
Made up of user-generated content, Horizon Worlds is a new social virtual world where creators can design the world themselves by using tools in VR applications.
Users can take risks and have fun in Horizon Worlds for a novel experience that is completely different from everyday life.
Now, Meta has announced the start of testing commercialization tools for selling digital assets, allowing users to sell the right to use items and experiences, providing the necessary avenues for the value of digital assets to circulate.
Horizon Venues provides the necessary conditions for hosting large events in VR, and in November 2021, Meta officially pointed out that users can watch NBA games in Quest through Horizon Venues.
After the Super Bowl performance in February 2021, the veteran American rock band Foo Fighter held a VR concert at Horizon Venues, and Quest users will be able to sit in the front row to experience.
Horizon Workrooms has made VR offices easier and more usable, providing businesses and employees with more ways to work from home to improve communication efficiency during the pandemic. However, Horizon Workrooms isn't Meta's first fora to build a metaverse social platform.
Back in 2016, Meta launched Workplace, a cross-platform VR collaboration platform for VR users, allowing users to stream live and enable multi-person chat. Horizon Workrooms, based on Workplace, takes VR to the next level.
Meta metaverse social platforms are developing steadily, and we look forward to seeing more performance from Horizon.
Build a meta-universe infrastructure platform
However, Meta's ambitions do not stop there, and Meta, which is committed to becoming a benchmark enterprise in the meta-universe, is still working to build a meta-universe infrastructure platform.
In addition to promoting the development of hardware and creating a meta-universe social platform, Meta has also launched a new artificial intelligence research super cluster (RSC) with Nvidia, and has joined hands with telefónica to establish a meta-universe innovation center to promote the construction of multiple meta-universe infrastructures such as AI, computing power, and network transmission.
Meta said: "We hope that the leap in computing power will not only help us create more accurate AI models for existing services, but also enable a completely new user experience, especially in the metaverse... It is helping us create the foundational technologies that power the metaverse and move the wider AI community forward. ”
In the second phase of fiscal 2022, RSC will be able to achieve 50 billion billion operations per second and have a target transmission bandwidth of 16TB/s, becoming one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world.
RSC will enable the models needed for technologies such as speech recognition to work in hundreds of different languages, and seamlessly analyze text, images, and videos, develop new augmented reality tools, and build entirely new AI systems.
RSC will promote the implementation of related products in the metaverse field, including reviewing massive content, real-time translation, and combining high-performance AI with AR, etc., to finally build a metaverse.
In addition to RSC, Meta is also committed to providing better network support, making great strides in latency and bandwidth to achieve low latency and immersion in the metaverse.
The exploration of blockchain technology
Blockchain technology, as an important part of the metaverse, has been exploring blockchain technology as early as the Facebook era.
In 2018, Facebook had plans to develop a Crypto-based payment platform, appointing David Marcus, vice president who had served as president of PayPal and a member of the board of directors of the exchange Coinbase, as the head of the blockchain division, and then continued to hire Crypto developers.
A year later, on June 18, 2019, Facebook released a Libra white paper, officially announcing the launch of Token Libra. Libra is a fiat asset and high-credit government bonds (a basket of currencies) as a reserve backed dollar Stablecoin, issued by the Libra Association, a multi-member organization.
As the world's largest social platform with nearly 3 billion users, Facebook has many users in various countries, if Facebook really issued such a currency, its influence can be described as unprecedented, and it will also profoundly affect the finances of various countries.
Therefore, the launch of Libra is like a stone stirring up thousands of waves, causing various countries to compete for research, but also giving countries huge pressure, indirectly accelerating the research and development progress of central banks' digital currency CBDCs.
However, Libra has a wide range of influences, and countries have taken it seriously, in this case, Libra has encountered a wall everywhere, and the regulatory authorities in various countries have unanimously lit a red light on Libra, and Libra's association members are gradually losing.
Seeing such resistance, Facebook decided to take a step back and renamed Libra to Diem on December 1, 2020, while changing its original design based on a basket of currencies to support the single dollar and anchor with the dollar, in the same form as other Crypto dollar Stablecoins such as THE USDC.
However, this step back did not make the regulator pay the bill, and after more than a year of persistence, Facebook, which had changed its name to Meta, finally decided to sell Dim.
On January 31, 2022, Meta officially announced the sale of its Crypto payment network Diem to Silvergate Capital Corporation for $182 million.
However, Meta did not completely abandon Crypto's currency play, this time the failure was only the issuance of US dollar Stablecoin, Meta began to take the idea of payment platform instead.
On the same day That Diem was sold, Meta turned around and joined the Crypto Open Patent Consortium (COPA), which consists of more than 30 members, including MicroStrategy, Kraken, Coinbase, Uniswap, and others.
Members bring together their Crypto patents to form a shared patent library, and any member is free to use the technology behind the patents to protect Crypto's innovations.
Meta's move is also a quick adjustment strategy, since the road of distribution does not work, it can also directly use the existing Crypto, you can also explore more use scenarios and revenue sources.
Meta's products are likely to access Crypto support in the future, allowing Web2 users of the traditional Internet to manage their Own Web3 assets, and Meta can also become a bridge across Web2 and Web3, grasping the outlet of Web3.
In addition, Meta Financial Technologies, Meta's financial arm, has been exploring the creation of a virtual currency, internally known as "Zaq Coin," to reward creators, lend, and support other financial services.
The goal is for the metaverse world that supports Meta, but it may not be based on blockchain development, which is a bit like the Q coin we know well, and it has to be said that this is also an existing successful experience, and it is worth a try.
At this point, Meta's planned plan for nearly four years seems to have died before it was successful, but fortunately, it can still be actively adjusted, and there are some new hopes.
In addition, with the popularity of NFT in recent years, NFT has become a new application direction with a degree of attention that is not less than Crypto.
Many traditional companies and institutions have entered the NFT and tried to combine their business with the NFT, including some familiar brands, such as Adidas, Time Magazine, Louis Vuitton and so on.
And some avatar NFTs have also quickly spread to overseas social media, these NFTs are often a series of NFTs with similar characteristics, in addition to their own style will be liked by people, but also as a way for owners to express themselves.
Therefore, this type of NFT is also defined as a new category of NFTs called PFP (profile picture), that is, profile pictures.
More and more celebrities have joined the PFP game, and have replaced their own PFP on various social media.
And this boom has also reached more people with their influence, it can be said that PFP is the perfect match between social and NFT applications, and such a feast can not be less social giant Meta?
On April 8, according to a memorandum from the Financial Times that meta, the company has set a rough timeline for the integration of NFTs and blockchain technology into its applications and services, and plans to take the lead in launching an NFT pilot program on Facebook in May this year.
There are not a few social platforms with this action, and Twitter has also launched the NFT avatar function, allowing users to use NFTs as their personal avatars.
It seems that a scramble between social giants for the commanding heights of NFT has begun, and NFT as an important technology in the metaverse, this exploration can also find the direction of meta in the metaverse layout, whether Meta can continue its hegemony in the metaverse, let us wait and see.
Why does Meta value the metaverse?
User growth on its social platforms peaked
On February 2, 2022, Meta announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021, in which the data of users is worth pondering. Meta's monthly active users (MAU) was 2.91 billion, with no quarter-on-quarter growth.
But at the same time, its daily active users have decreased by about 500,000, and Facebook's total number of users has declined for the first time since its birth. In terms of the growth curve of the enterprise, Facebook has entered a mature period from a stage of rapid growth.
Facebook's user growth stagnation is a variety of factors, one of which is that the number of users is close to the ceiling.
At present, Facebook has about 3 billion users, and there are about 4.8 billion Internet users in the world, except for a few countries that are not open to Facebook, such as the 1.08 billion Internet users on the mainland, the remaining market capacity has been relatively limited.
And today's Facebook has developed all the countries that can develop, no new countries can expand, and the growth of the number of users has seen a ceiling.
The second is the attributes of the user itself, Facebook as a product has been developed for 18 years, and its user base is often older and less accepted by today's young people.
With the rapid development of the network, video applications are rising, Tiktok as the international version of Douyin, since its launch in 2017, in just a few years has become one of the most popular social software overseas, perennial hegemony in the application market.
In the case of limited market capacity, difficulty in continuing to expand the market, and the continuous impact of new products and no new users entering the market, old products such as Facebook are like a pool of stagnant water, and if there is no new water source to inject, Facebook will gradually evaporate.
Therefore, in order to break the game, it is necessary to tap new markets. Nowadays, video applications are in the sky, the video market is already a red sea, the pattern has been determined, meta if you cut in at this time, it is tantamount to more difficult.
But the sudden explosion of the metaverse concept in 2021 gave Meta new inspiration. Given that Meta has been laying out the VR space for a long time, especially in the VR hardware market, Meta has an overwhelming advantage.
One of the key ways to present the metaverse is through a headset device like VR, meta holds such a good card, naturally it is necessary to go with the flow.
Obviously, from the current situation, Meta is not just going with the flow, but directly pouring all its strength into expanding this blue ocean that has not yet been reclaimed.
But this time, Meta isn't just trying to recreate a social empire on the app.
There are many reasons why Apple can become the company with the largest market value, but the most supporting its revenue is mainly based on its excellent hardware products and its App Store.
The combination of hardware and the app store is the right secret to get rich, which is why we can also see that Huawei mobile phones have Huawei market, Xiaomi mobile phones have Millet market, everyone knows it well.
In the same way, this set of logic can also be applied in the VR field, who can win enough share of the VR hardware market, who can occupy a dominant position in the future VR application market, and can have a steady stream of cash flow.
Meta currently occupies about 80% of the market for VR equipment, and it is necessary to continue to work hard to win the share of the application market, but the overall number of users of VR is still only in the tens of millions, and Meta needs to continue to invest in order to maintain its advantage and expand the market.
The business financial report is not optimistic
The earnings report in early February attracted a lot of attention because it was the first financial report after Meta's name change, but it was this less than expected earnings report that caused its stock price to plummet by 21%.
The company's market value evaporated by about $252 billion (about 1602.8 billion yuan) in a single day, and it also set the largest one-day decline since the company went public in 2012, a veritable "one trillion yuan decline".
In this financial report, we can see that the growth of Meta's main advertising business in 2021 is weak, and it has lost the bright eyes of previous years.
At the same time, the meta-universe development division, which has high hopes, has not been profitable, but has brought a loss of $10 billion, which is the first time that the "Reality Labs" financial sector representing the meta-universe business has been listed separately after Meta's name change last year.
Leaving aside the profitability of the innovation business (focusing on the meta-universe) to look at the overall data, the fourth quarter of 2021 Meta revenue was $33.67 billion, an increase of 20% year-on-year, slightly exceeding expectations, but a significant slowdown from the first three quarters of last year.
In terms of net profit, Meta fell for the first time since the second quarter of 2019, recording $10.29 billion, down 8% year-on-year, and we know that Meta's traditional way of profitability is mainly advertising, but as we said above, the decline in user activity on its social platforms has directly affected revenue.
Of course, the revenue of the old business (advertising sales of $32.6 billion) in the entire financial report still exceeds that of many Internet companies.
However, in the face of the decline in revenue of the old business, it is naturally urgent to open up innovative businesses, so even in the face of the current loss of tens of billions, Meta still chooses to bet on the meta-universe.
National privacy laws limit development and need new stories
When we focus on Meta's earnings report, we will inevitably be shocked by the proportion of its advertising revenue, Meta's total revenue in fiscal 2021 is $117.929 billion.
Its advertising business revenue reached $114.934 billion, while reality lab revenue was only $2.274 billion, and other business revenue was less than $800 million.
Such a revenue distribution naturally makes people wonder where this huge advertising revenue comes from, if you look back at Meta's heels planted on privacy data in the past few years, it may have been numerous, and even the number of people affected has been expanded repeatedly, from millions to tens of millions, and then to 500 million people last year, Meta has been plagued by privacy leaks.
Even before its annual earnings report was released, senior British officials warned that if Meta did not comply with the new Cybersecurity Law, Zuckerberg could face stronger legal prosecutions.
Meta's advertising revenue is precisely because of the user's various types of data as a support, simply put, when you use its social products, as the frequency of use increases, it will know more and more about you, and this understanding will be used as a reference for advertising promotion.
So when the privacy laws of various countries become more and more stringent, Meta has to choose to consider a new story, after all, if the privacy protections of all countries become stricter, its advertising revenue decline in a year may not be as good as the losses of the meta-universe business for several years.
Compete for the hardware and software scenarios of the next generation of smart devices
If Meta's name change was the opening of its meta-universe business, the acquisition of Oculus years ago was already a feat of anticipation.
After all, betting on the VR business in 2014 now looks like Mr. Li Lu of Himalaya Capital betting on BYD 20 years ago (bringing nearly 70 times returns).
Of course, Meta's current layout in the VR and AR field can not be underestimated, after all, if the VR market share of more than 60% is continued in the future, it will be a very scary data.
According to the latest report released by international data analysis company IDC, the global AR/VR headset shipments reached 11.23 million units in 2021, and the market increased by 92.1% year-on-year. Among them, the shipment volume of VR headset reached 10.95 million units, breaking through the important inflection point of the industry with annual shipments of 10 million units.
It is expected that the global VR headset shipments will exceed 15.73 million units in 2022, an increase of 43.6% year-on-year.
Just imagine, in 2021, the annual shipment volume of global mobile smartphones is 1.35 billion units, not to mention reaching the same level, once it exceeds 100 million, the VR hardware market will skyrocket.
This does not include all kinds of matching software market growth, to know that the annual matching software market size is also trillions of volumes, perhaps Meta sees a trend, even all the Internet giants have seen, otherwise why have they entered the market?
Perhaps there will still be people who use Facebook "don't face" to mock its change of name to Meta, but when looking back at the above listed content, we have to sigh that it is not easy for giants to turn around, but they seem to see the future of the metaverse, whether it is the practice of personal practice or the investment of capital, Meta is worthy of our admiration.
Can a centralized meta-universe take shape?
Despite Meta's ambitious bet on the metaverse, the openness and decentralization of the metaverse may also prevent it from creating a true metaverse, which has been criticized by many metaversic practitioners.
Especially those who have been influenced by Web3, after all, Meta has been accustomed to using the advantages of centralization for decades to earn capital income, making it seem difficult to abandon "inertia".
But as we see more and more of the so-called "centralized" giants begin to dabble in the metaverse, we begin to think newly.
Do users need a completely free and open Internet or metaverse, or do they find a new balance between convenience and privacy?
If Meta creates a metaverse that is in line with both web3 and public perception, perhaps the story will change.
Unlike many entrepreneurial metaverse companies, Meta is more like an "intrapreneurship", or even a transformation of the whole force, and the metacosm they create is bound to be more acceptable to users.
After all, no one in Meta, which has 2 billion active users, knows users better than they do.
So when we worry that Meta has created a metaverse that is not what we envisioned, or that it is not our ideal build, they also think about what mainstream users will need and what they like.
And this fun game is the real challenge for Meta.
Apple founder Steve Jobs has always believed in one rule: users simply don't know what they want.
So, what the metaverse we want is like, or we don't know it ourselves, as Ford Motor Co. founder Ford described: If you ask people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries what they want, they will never say it's a car, they'll say I want a faster horse.
【Disclaimer】:This article is the original operation team of the Meta-Universe Heart, it is strictly forbidden to reprint without permission, if you need to reprint, please contact us, the copyright and final interpretation of the article belong to the Meta-Universe Heart.