Louise Bernard with Gauthier Delomez, and AFP 09:19, October 18, 2021

The American firm Facebook plans to hire 10,000 people within five years in the European Union to work on the "metaverse", the parallel digital world desired by Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of the social networking giant. It will allow you to spend time with your friends, work, play, go shopping ... without leaving home, according to the group.

This is the quest for the holy grail for Mark Zuckerberg, founder and boss of Facebook.

The social network giant will employ 10,000 people in Europe within five years to work on a very specific project, the "metaverse", a kind of digital backbone of the physical world, accessible via the internet.

According to the group, this new technology should make it possible to spend time with friends, work, play, learn, go shopping… without leaving home.

Facebook will therefore recruit many "highly qualified" engineers, but the countries concerned by these job creations are not yet known.

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"The feeling of really being there, with the people"

"This investment is a vote of confidence in the strength of the European tech industry and the potential of European tech talent," Briton Nick Clegg and Spaniard Javier Olivan, two of the top officials in the world, said in a blog post. group, without giving details of the nature and location of the jobs. “The essential quality of the metaverse will be the presence - the feeling of really being there with people,” Mark Zuckerberg explained in July on his Facebook profile.

It is not just about creating "a great new experience", but also "an economic wave that could create opportunities for people all over the world", he also explained in a video interview during the Vivatech fair in June.

Facebook's announcement comes against a backdrop of strain for the California-based company, which needs to restore its image as it is regularly accused of ignoring the negative social impacts of its activities.