Facebook recently announced that the company would no longer be defined by or limited to the image of a social media giant, and has renamed the parent company as Meta Platforms, Inc., under which Facebook (the social media platform), Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus would simply be its various brands.
Mark Zuckerberg delivered this announcement in an hour-long online presentation at the annual Connect event (a virtual reality and augmented reality conference) on 28th Oct 2021, explaining that the company's vision has outgrown the social media label.
He expounded that with a Meta (Greek for 'beyond's), they plan to further develop the company's newfound goals in the field of virtual reality and other technologies relating to the metaverse.
Metaverse originally referred to a hypothetical futuristic equivalent of the Internet in Neal Stephenson's 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash. Zuckerberg is planning to bridge the gap between fiction and reality with the new direction the company is taking, and bring to life an extensive virtual reality network that can be employed for everything from gaming and workout sessions to work and education purposes.