Oct 28
Mark Zuckerberg said his company is rebranding in an effort to encompass its virtual-reality vision for the future.
Oct 28
Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Makes Powerful Speech In Support Of Sexual Violence Victims
Posted in: Today's ChiliCamilla urged those at a reception to renew “our commitment to do everything we can to end violence against women.”
Oct 28
Facebook is rebranding, taking on the new name Meta as it tries to lead the metaverse push – and add some distance with ongoing controversy about the social network. “Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during … Continue reading
Oct 28
Today Oculus and Facebook (now Meta) teased a new VR headset called Project Cambria. This device was described as an advanced and high-end VR product that’ll bring the wearer “a step closer to the metaverse.” A single video was released about the device, giving precious little information about the way it’ll work, or what it’ll actually be capable of doing. … Continue reading
Oct 28
Dropbox still lacks a native app for Apple’s latest Mac models running its M1 silicon, forcing users to utilize a battery-hungry version of the software operating under Apple’s Rosetta translation process. A recent tweet highlighting some posts on the Dropbox forums stirred up chaos among Dropbox users by indicating a native M1 app may never arrive, and now the company … Continue reading
Oct 28
'Project Cambria' is a high-end VR headset designed for Facebook's metaverse
Posted in: Today's ChiliFacebook is working on a new high-end VR headset codenamed Project Cambria. The company teased the device during its recent Connect conference on Thursday. It plans to release the headset sometime next year. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it will be a separate “high-end” product from the company’s $299 Quest 2 headset. It will also cost more than that device.
Cambria will include capabilities that currently aren’t possible on other VR headsets. New sensors in the device will allow your virtual avatar to maintain eye contact and reflect your facial expressions. The company says that’s something that will allow people you’re interacting with virtually to get a better sense of how you’re feeling. Another focus of the headset will be mixed-reality experiences. With the help of new sensors and reconstruction algorithms, Facebook claims Cambria will have the capability to represent objects in the physical world with a sense of depth and perspective.
Cambria will also feature new optics that the company said will increase visual fidelity. Facebook promised to share more details about the headset next year. In the meantime, it mentioned that third-party developers are already working on experiences for the device.
Oct 28
Facebook, the social network, will no longer define the future of Facebook, the company that will now be known as Meta. Facebook Inc. is changing the name in order to distinguish its beleaguered social network, which has an increasingly poor reputation around the globe, from the company that is pinning its future on the promise of a “metaverse.”
“Our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything that we’re doing today, let alone in the future,” Zuckerberg said. “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook first.”
Zuckerberg announced the new name during a virtual (meta-virtual?) keynote for the company’s Connect event. Under its new arrangement, Facebook and its “family of apps” will be a division of the larger Meta company, which will still be led my Zuckerberg.
The restructuring bears some similarities to when Google restructured itself into Alphabet, the holding company that now operates Google, along with its “other bets” like DeepMind and Nest. Facebook previously said it plans to separate Facebook Reality Labs, its AR and VR group, from the rest of the company when reporting its financial performance. In a new statement it added that its”corporate structure” won’t be changing. The company is also changing its stock ticker from FB to MVRS beginning in December.
Facebook
The company is positioning the name as more reflective of its future ambitions to evolve from social network to metaverse company. Zuckerberg is still defining exactly what being a “metaverse company” means for its main platform and users, but augmented and virtual reality is central to the vision. The company has already shown off an early version of one project, called Horizon Workrooms, that allows people to conduct meetings in VR. The company also previewed new “Horizon Home” and “Horizon Venues” experiences. (All of the company’s social VR products will fall under the larger “Meta Horizon” brand, according to a post from incoming CTO Andrew Bosworth.) And, earlier this month, the company announced plans to hire 10,000 new workers in Europe in order to build out its metaverse.
The name change also comes at one of the most precarious moments in the company’s history. The social network is reeling from the fallout of the “Facebook Papers,” a trove of internal documents collected by a former employee turned whistleblower. The documents have been the basis for a series of complaints to the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as the source of more than a dozen reports about the company’s failings to stem the tide of misinformation, hate speech and other harms caused by the platform.
Facebook
The new name also means that the iconic Facebook “thumbs up” will no longer be the company’s official logo or on the signage at its headquarters. (Incidentally, the role of “likes” and other reactions in enabling hate and anger on Facebook has been a central narrative of the Facebook Papers disclosures.) In a blog post about the design of the new name and logo, the company said the new logo was optimized for 3D experiences and “designed to be experienced from different perspectives and interacted with.”
It’s worth noting that the new name doesn’t change anything for the main Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp services, which will be known by their existing names. But the services could get more metaverse-oriented experiences with time. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said that users could expect “a more immersive Instagram experience in the metaverse.” Bosworth also notes that some “relevant products and services” would be rebranded as well, such as the Portal lineup, which will eventually take on “Meta Portal” branding. The company also plans to “retire” the Oculus name, with the VR products taking on the Meta identity.
Oct 28
The chronicling of human evolution has proven to be an onerous and complicated task, resulting in all sorts of contradictions and inconsistencies. A group of scientists is seeking to make better sense of this anthropological mess by proposing a new species of ancestral human that calls for the reassigning of certain…
Oct 28
UNESCO World Heritage Sites are the planet’s most iconic places and include sites from the natural and built world. But a new report from the group shows that a small but vital number of forests that have received a UNESCO designation are being irrevocably altered by human activities.
Oct 28
In a truly double-take-inducing finding, geneticists recently surveyed a population of critically endangered California condors and found that two of the birds reproduced without actually mating.
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