Mark Zuckerberg wants to smooth the edges off Meta's baby metaverse

There was an elephant in the Zoom room and Mark Zuckerberg knew it.

In a call with reporters ahead of the company's 2021 Facebook Connect conference this week, the embattled social media CEO winkingly acknowledged his recently renamed company's latest bout of controversy, a two-fisted blow from whistleblower Frances Haugen's damning testimony and the coordinated journalistic effort around leaked internal documents known as the Facebook Papers.

"A bunch of people will say that this is not the time to focus on the future," Zuckerberg said before quickly and neatly shifting focus to Facebook's augmented and virtual reality developments.

"At the same time, I think there will always be issues in the present. I think it's important to push forward to continue trying to create what the future is."

These are some of the new skins Facebook hopes we'll slip into for its metaverse. Credit: Facebook

If Facebook's metaversified future is anything like the cesspool of its social media present, then we have much to be concerned about.

So just what is this dangling carrot of the future that Zuckerberg is so laser-focused on? After hearing from several internal leads spanning AR and VR development, as well as Zuckerberg and Chief Technical Officer Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, that vision sounds eerily reminiscent of VR 2.0's early days. In other words, it's all about "presence."

Around 2014 to 2016, "presence" was the key buzzword executives and developers would trot out when demonstrating the possibilities of their experimental VR experiences. It was the secret sauce that would convert any 2D media consumer into a VR believer, and it wasn't without merit. Indeed, many of the medium's transformative early experiences, like theBlu: Whale Encounter, were sold by the big smiles and visceral reactions of users who felt like they were "really there."

Horizon Workrooms will soon let businesses customize their spaces. Credit: facebook

Fast-forward to 2021, and Facebook's Oculus Quest 2 is now the platform leader for standalone (or wireless) VR, a triumph made possible by its aggressively priced headsets and a lack of any real competitors. The company hasn't released sales data for the headset but a recent recall for the device's facial interface pegged that figure somewhere around the 4 million mark.

As Facebook itself said this week, "VR is at an inflection point," and it's bringing AR along for the ride. To industry observers, this is a natural pivot for the company. Apple, Sony, Microsoft, and Valve are coming for a slice of the burgeoning metaverse and Facebook needs to be ready.

To stake its early claim to millions of metaverse "citizens," Facebook is essentially polishing the current Quest experience, which is capable of delivering AR experiences using the headset's room-scanning cameras, by releasing a trio of software developer kits known as the Presence Platform, as well as highlighting three distinct areas of growth: personal, play, and professional.

Gaming and entertainment applications have become something of a no-brainer for the Quest 2. But as we saw during the early days of the pandemic, the technology needed for remote work was mostly uncharted territory.

No longer, as Facebook is beefing up its Horizon Workrooms experience, adding the ability to bypass the Facebook account login in favor of your work account, create customized work spaces for brands, and even allowing crucial 2D enterprise apps like Slack and Dropbox to be pinned in a user's Home environment.

That Home is now also getting a rebrand to Horizon Home, dropping the previous Oculus moniker. It's a move that brings the company's suite of mixed-reality services — Workrooms and Worlds — more in line with what appears to be its eventual overarching Horizon branding. It's a fact made all the more concrete by Zuckerberg's own admission that, "A big part of the role that we hope to play is by stitching them together."

Users that put on their headsets and launch into Home will soon have the ability to make it more social by inviting friends to join them there and hang out, watch things, or even play games together.

The general play experience of the Quest platform is also getting an upgrade in the form of Messenger calls that'll be available throughout the interface, default cloud saves so you can delete apps and games without losing crucial data, and multiplayer invites that will ping users on every platform they can be reached (e.g., VR, phones, web).

As for its perpetually-in-beta social playspace for creators, Horizon Worlds, which is essentially the evolution of the social network in VR, Boz says there are no plans to immediately launch Quest users into that experience. Instead, users will continue to launch into Home, as it represents "a safe secure environment that you control."

Though it may seem like Horizon Worlds would be a natural landing pad for the metaverse Facebook is building for its users, Boz said the company wants to be careful in rolling it out.

"We really are trying to dial in the creator tools for this product. ...One of the worst things that can happen...is opening up so early that you get a community or culture that you're not trying to get to," he explained. "The culture is a reflection of tools that are being built."

If this approach seems odd for a company that built its worldwide user base of billions and its trillion-dollar valuation on the ethos "Move fast and break things," that's because it is. And Boz acknowledged as much.

"It's definitely a different approach for Facebook in particular and that's not an accident."