Facebook announces a new Metaverse product group, with plans to hire hundreds of staff, led by Instagram VP Vishal Shah, reporting to VR/AR VP Andrew Bosworth
The company plans to hire hundreds of new staffers for the group. — Facebook is all in on the Metaverse …
The move foreshadows a broader corporate commitment: related coverage later reported both a planned name change reflecting the metaverse focus and separate reporting for the FRL segment alongside more than $10 billion of AR/VR spending.
First-order effects
Vishal Shah moves from Instagram to lead Facebook's metaverse product group, reporting to Andrew Bosworth and giving the effort a clearer product-management chain.
Facebook will add hundreds of staff to the group, expanding the team responsible for metaverse products rather than leaving the work solely within the existing VR/AR structure.
Second-order effects
Instagram loses a vice president to a company-level initiative, while Bosworth's VR/AR unit becomes the management hub connecting new metaverse product work with Facebook's existing AR and VR efforts.
The staffing commitment raises the organizational weight of metaverse products ahead of the later-reported separate FRL financial reporting, making their costs and investment more visible inside Facebook's results.
Third-order effects
Facebook's progression from VR app experiments to functional AR/VR teams and now a dedicated product group signals a shift from exploratory technology work toward a durable business organization around metaverse products.
If separate reporting and sustained spending continue, the metaverse effort becomes easier for investors and rivals to assess as a distinct operating bet rather than an internal feature initiative.
The trend: Facebook is formalizing metaverse development as a dedicated product organization, combining leadership, hiring, and increasingly visible AR/VR investment.
The work we've been doing at Facebook Reality Labs is central to the Metaverse. Today we're standing up a Metaverse product group under my organization to bring together the teams focused on responsibly building this ambitious work: https://www.facebook.com/...
Mark Zuckerberg thinks we are going to finally solve inequality by building an interoperable VR/AR metaverse. I reeeeeeeaaally would like to know how the parts of our country who can't get broadband are going to fare in Mark's metaverse. https://twitter.com/...
org shifts inside of Facebook in short: this metaverse project (??) is going under @boztank and the Facebook Reality Labs team. some execs from IG and Gaming being moved off their former teams. https://www.facebook.com/...
Instagram's head of product has moved to lead a “Metaverse” product org within Facebook's AR/VR group. Current open job listings for IG: 45 Openings for AR/VR: 720 https://www.facebook.com/...
Shut up about the metaverse already. MMO's in 1999 are closer to the metaverse than 99% of what people are talking about as being the metaverse these days. You're just making an another app.
Oculus is full of metaverse talk this week. I can't stop thinking in what @ID_AA_Carmack said recently about the metaverse, that it is a far too-abstract, too far&big goal, that it tends to make people to get lost, and often losing focus in the short term things that matters. htt…
@Diegobez FB talking a lot about a “metaverse” but it's been 2 years since they announced just Horizon and it's still in closed beta? Maybe they should ship that first? Focus smaller.
There is ambitious ‘world building’ stuff at the heart of all this. But short term, expect some augmented reality shops on Instagram in a year or two, along with more QR codes in real life shops and on products. Also a kind-of ‘IRL’ Instagram, if a AR-specs go mainstream. https:/…
Facebook is becoming a ‘Metaverse Company’ because humans are becoming Metaverse native. They are just following the trend that all of us are creating.
Facebook is reorganizing to build out a new Metaverse product group that will be headed by Vishal Shah, Instagram's current VP of product. https://www.protocol.com/...
Seeing Mark Zuckerberg talk about how he wants Facebook to become a “metaverse,” is so weird to me because... have you been on Facebook lately? It's like a high tech version of the ugliest 1998 geocities fan site you could ever imagine, populated by a bunch of raving fascists.
They want a made up universe where they don't have y to o be accountable over actually making products work Start rebuilding your websites https://twitter.com/...
What exactly is this “Metaverse” product group building @boztank? Is this a new inherently multi-user game engine, an SDK to connect disparate apps, a new layer of the web, or something else? https://twitter.com/...
He believes the #metaverse is necessary because our current way of interacting on #SocialMedia is still so far removed from how we interact in real life #MarkZuckerberg Wants To Build An Online “Metaverse” Accessible On All Game Consoles https://www.thegamer.com/... https://twitt…
facebook stumbled upon a way to call their ad-filled VR world something palatable to the nerds and love to see them doubling down on it https://twitter.com/...
Update on the Instagram side here: a spokesperson tells me IG product will now be co-led by Ashley Yuki, a current product director, and Max Eulenstein, who is returning after a very brief stint running product at Instacart https://twitter.com/...
So thrilled to bring both my Facebook Gaming worlds together!! Excited to be reunited with FRL leading content for the Metaverse as we continue to build Facebook's gaming initiatives including both our Instant and Cloud gaming platforms. https://twitter.com/...
“The defining quality of the metaverse will be presence — the feeling of really being there with people” -> I just hope that presence is underpinned by the real identities of people, not the fake, ego-driven version of people we get on social media today. https://twitter.com/...