Facebook prompted both praise and condemnation this week when it announced a sweeping new focus on a virtual reality “metaverse,” so all-encompassing that the company is changing its name to Meta.
But it sounds like not everybody at the social media giant is thrilled with the new strategy, even among the megacorporation’s high ranking VR developers.
Take John Carmack, the legendary programmer behind “Doom” and “Quake” who took a job as CTO of Oculus VR prior to its acquisition by Facebook. During a keynote address at Facebook’s Connect conference this week, after the announcement of the direction change, Carmack sounded off about the metaverse announcement — and he sounded pretty annoyed.
“I have been pretty actively arguing against every single metaverse effort that we have tried to spin up internally in the company from even pre-acquisition times,” said Carmack, whose title is now consulting CTO, during the address. “I have pretty good reasons to believe that setting out to build the metaverse is not actually the best way to wind up with the metaverse.”
