Facebook has set aside $50 million for its XR Programs and Research fund over the next two years.
Facebook has announced that it will invest $50 million in a two-year fund to begin work on realising the company’s vision for a virtual metaverse.
A Sept. 27 announcement articulates Facebook’s roadmap for building its metaverse, with the funding slated to back “global research and program partners” looking to build out the platform in addition to internal research.
The metaverse won’t be built overnight by a single company. We’ll collaborate with policymakers, experts and industry partners to bring this to life,” emphasized the announcement.
Through their avatar in a virtual environment, people will be able to interact with one another, digital objects, and the physical world in the Metaverse. The money will be given out by Facebook’s XR Programs and Research Fund.
Rumors of Facebook’s plan to create a virtual metaverse first surfaced in June, with the company announcing the formation of an executive team tasked with overseeing the project the following month.
According to Facebook’s most recent announcement, its metaverse “is not necessarily about spending more time online — it’s about making the time you do spend online more meaningful.”
Despite the $50 million investment fund, Facebook believes it will take more than a decade until a comprehensive version of its metaverse will be live and featuring a wide array of products and services.
To ensure its metaverse is deployed in a way that is ethical and inclusive, Facebook has also partnered with multiple universities and non-profit organizations representing minority groups, including Women In Immersive Tech, Africa No Filter, The University of Hong Kong, and the National University of Singapore.
As Facebook mobilises capital to begin developing its metaverse, crypto developers have already made significant progress in developing their own decentralised and interoperable metaverses.
The open-world metaverse of Decentraland is a decentralised community-owned virtual world built on the Ethereum blockchain. Users can create 3D environments, avatars, and showcase a variety of digital content that can be monetized.
Similarly, the Sandbox is an NFT-powered game in which users can purchase digital plots of land and build gaming experiences on top of them to share with other users.