At its virtual Connect conference on Thursday, Facebook gave a special presentation to show the world its vision for the元,并宣布它已选择了一半的学期它的新公司名称：元.
The company says that it’s betting big on what it thinks will be the next big thing in personal computing, a virtual space where people can work, play, or socialize, all through the lenses of virtual reality (VR) headsets or augmented reality (AR) glasses. It expects to spend more than $10 billion on Facebook Reality Labs (henceforth to be known as just Reality Labs), the division leading the development of its mixed-reality hardware and software. It’s said to have more than 10,000 people working on the initiative already.
Thursday’s keynote didn’t feature a lot of news about specific products, but instead served as an overview of all the mixed reality R&D going on across the company now. Some of experiences took place within the confines of an Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality headset–thoughOculus品牌将消失- 其他人发生在现实世界中，通过未来一对元增强现实眼镜的镜头看到。
进入面孔（我的意思是元）
经过短暂的演讲，Facebook首席执行官马克·扎克伯格（Mark Zuckerberg）浏览了一系列虚拟设置，其中一些是梦幻般的。第一站是一个叫做“家”的空间。扎克伯格说：“您的房屋是您的个人空间，您可以从那里传送到任何想要的地方。”他的家中有稀疏的装饰，壁炉和窗户外面的旷野景色。
扎克伯格的阿凡达（Avatar）看上去像是他自己的卡通版，然后传送到飞船上Meta CTO-to-be Andrew Bosworth，他是一个大红色机器人的皮肤，等待他加入纸牌游戏。Facebook认为，人们会根据口味选择不同种类的化身，以及他们是否想匿名。在宇宙飞船中，一个人看起来像是她真实自我的视频图像。另一个看起来像一个逼真的化身（她可以飞）。
“There will be all kinds of spaces that people make–rooms . . . but also games and whole worlds that you can teleport in and out of whenever you want, Zuckerberg said.
Most people think of the metaverse as a place where you can go anywhere and be anything, an idea Zuckerberg acknowledged: “Teleporting in the metaverse will be like clicking a link on the internet–it’s an open standard.”
Meta might create such an open standard to allow any user or developer to connect their virtual space to others. But for now, there is no industry standard that might allow the company and another such as Roblox to federate, so that they honored each other’s cryptocurrency and users could teleport easily back and forth between the two digital spaces. Meta’s presentation Thursday would have been more in the spirit of the metaverse had it announced such partnerships.
Connection through technology
演讲中最有趣的用例和经验发生在混合现实中。与VR空间相比，它们似乎更容易令人信服，人性化（幽闭恐惧症）。因此，他们最终可以通过技术给遥远的朋友或家人一种团结一致的感觉更加有效。
In the presentation, we saw a man sitting at a chess board on the street, and across from him was his friend and opponent from across the world, represented as a sort of ghost image (presumably that’s how the friends looked to each other through AR glasses). They were playing chess using a virtual chess board positioned between them.
Unfortunately it’s these mixed reality experiences that may be hardest to pull off. The AR glasses required need very powerful processors and lots of sensors, all packed into a normal-sized pair of glasses. Michael Abrash, who leads Meta’s development of AR glasses, says that the company must make research breakthroughs in a dozen different areas before it can make its conception of AR glasses a reality.
为什么现在？
Most of the experience Zuckerberg and others showed in the keynote don’t yet exist. Some of them are closer to being ready for market than others. The mixed reality stuff is years away. Is it just a coincidence that Facebook began talking about so much about the metaverse–and even changed its name to Meta–during a year the company has been in increasingly hot water in the press and in Washington DC? Some people think not.
“The name change from Facebook to Meta [is] a blatant attempt to distance Mark Zuckerberg’s company from growing outrage over the harm it is causing to democracy in the US and around the world,” says Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. “Zuckerberg and his lieutenants can’t shed the Facebook albatross with a clever brand adjustment. It’s past time for meaningful self-regulation combined with carefully designed government oversight.”
如果最激进的场景涉及政府干预以在Facebook统治- 我的意思是元看 - 实际上，在其元视野有机会成为现实之时，其名称可能已经改变了很多。