Science fiction has often provided the basis for evolving the technology we use every day.

The video telephony that Fritz Lang invented in the classic film “Metropolis” in 1927 is now available on every smartphone or computer.

Bastian Benrath

Editor in business.

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So when Mark Zuckerberg says, "I expect people will start seeing us no longer primarily as a social media company, but as a metaverse company," then that's not so absurd.

Because this idea also comes from a science fiction work, the 1992 novel “Snow Crash” by the American author Neal Stephenson.

At most, it seems a little unusual that the book is a dystopia.

The action takes place in Los Angeles in the not too distant future, years after a global economic crisis and the collapse of the state structures that existed in America.

From this inhospitable panorama, its inhabitants flee again and again into the “metaverse”, a virtual environment in which they interact by means of digital identities.

New technology for immersion

Excluding the dystopian context, it is precisely this vision that Zuckerberg has of the future of the Internet - and for which he has just announced 10,000 new jobs on Facebook. How exactly this metaverse will look is, of course, not yet entirely clear. In any case, the vision includes an Internet that you can “dive into” more than before. For example in the form of virtual reality (VR): Facebook has already invested heavily in this technology in the past, with which digital content fills the entire field of vision of the viewer via data glasses.

The group took over the Oculus company seven years ago and has been developing the glasses of the same name since then.

If VR becomes more widespread, it is conceivable that in the future you will actually be sitting at a conference table for a virtual meeting instead of just looking at your laptop.

Augmented reality (AR), in which digital content is still projected into a real field of vision, also offers connecting points for a metaverse.

One example of this is the mobile game "Pokémon Go", in which players hunt virtual mini monsters in the real world, which their phones display to them.

Life in the digital

On the other hand, the idea also stands for the fact that more and more activities and events that were previously analog are shifting to the digital.

The pandemic has accelerated this process: for example, video game fans who were friends agreed to meet for a game during the lockdowns last year.

In the Nintendo hit “Animal Crossing”, for example, the players maintain their own island - and can also receive visits from other players on it, represented by their avatars.

The fact that the singer Ariana Grande recently gave a concert in the game "Fortnite" takes the idea to extremes.

The head of the Fortnite development studio Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, is aligning the popular game more and more with the idea of ​​the metaverse.

Facebook boss Zuckerberg is therefore not the only supporter of the vision.

In addition to Sweeney, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the American investor Matthew Ball have prominently commented on a metaverse.

Nevertheless, the idea is particularly interesting for Facebook.

Reach for platform sovereignty

On the one hand, it distracts from the bad headlines the company is struggling with.

For example, Zuckerberg emphasizes at every opportunity that the metaverse offers potential for all tech companies and is not dominated by one company, which Facebook is often accused of in current social media.

On the other hand, the group is likely to associate the Metaverse with the hope that the cards will be reshuffled when it comes to access devices.

With iOS and Android, Facebook's rivals Apple and Google currently control the two dominant mobile phone operating systems in the world - along with their app stores.

In doing so, they set the rules as to which apps are allowed to appear and collect extremely lucrative commissions.

If the common access device to a metaverse in the future is VR glasses, for example, this could offer Facebook the chance to take over the platform sovereignty there.